About me
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at ETH Zürich and the PI of the SNSF Starting Grant Challenges and Breakthroughs in the Mathematics of Plasmas. During the 2024–25 academic year, I was a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
My research lies at the interface of kinetic theory, plasma physics, statistical mechanics, and nonlinear PDEs. Across these areas, I am interested in identifying the mathematical structures that make singular limits, long-time dynamics, and degenerate problems tractable.
Current directions in my group include Vlasov-type equations, quasineutral limits, kinetic Wasserstein distances, Landau damping and scattering, magnetic and electromagnetic plasma models, quantization of measures, and ultrafast diffusion.
Before joining ETH, I was an Assistant Professor at Durham University and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. I completed my undergraduate studies at Sapienza University of Rome and obtained a joint PhD in Mathematics from Sapienza and École Polytechnique in Paris.
News
New group members:
A warm welcome to our new group members, who are joining the group in September 2026:
- Mirko Cervi (PhD student)
- Lukas Niebel (Postdoctoral researcher)
- Noah Stevenson (HWI Postdoctoral researcher)
- Ilaria Zanotti (PhD stud)
Honours & awards
Mikaela Iacobelli has been awarded the Giuseppe Bartolozzi Prize: interview with MaddMaths
New preprints:
- Quantization of measures in Carnot groups in collaboration with M. Di Marco.
- Quasineutral Plasmas and the Geometry of Kinetic Stability
- From relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell to electron-MHD in the quasineutral regime in collaboration with A. Gagnebin, A. Rege, S. Rossi.
New accepted papers:
- Exponential convergence for ultrafast diffusion equations with log-concave weights
in collaboration with M. Fathi, to appear in Bull. Lond. Math. Sc. - Stability in Quasineutral Plasmas with Thermalized Electrons
in collaboration with M. Griffin-Pickering, to appear on Annals of PDE. - Scattering problem for Vlasov-type equations on the d-dimensional torus with Gevrey data in collaboration with D. Benedetto, E. Caglioti, A. Gagnebin, S. Rossi, to appear on Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré C - Analyse non linéaire.
Co-organized seminars
Contact information
Postal address
ETH Zurich Prof. Dr. Mikaela Iacobelli Department of Mathematics Group 5 HG G 62.2 Rämistrasse 101 8092 Zurich SwitzerlandContact data
+41 44 632 5968 https://people.math.ethz.ch/~imikaelaAssistant
Alessandra Naldi Windler +41 44 632 3684For thesis supervision and recommendation letters, please see "For Students".