Our Faculty

Here we showcase the research profiles of some of the faculty members at NCBJ and IChTJ who are involved in the activities of the graduate school. Some of them have taken on roles of thesis supervisors, while other have given lecture courses. They are a key element of the community and provide mentoring support as well as sharing expertise and experience in their fields of research.

Tolga Altinoluk I received his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2011. After working as Postdoctoral Researcher at Ecole Polytechnique in France, at University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and at Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal, he joined the faculty at NCBJ in 2017. His scientific interests center on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and its high energy limit with applications to high energy hadron and nuclear collisions. His current research interests are (i) computing higher order corrections in coupling constant to (single and/or multi) hadron/jet production, (ii) computing finite energy corrections to multi hadron/jet production and (iii) study the associated transverse momentum dependent distribution functions in back-to-back production limit within the CGC effective theory.


Michał Bluj is an experimental high-energy physicist working in the CMS experiment at LHC at CERN. Michał’s scientific interests focus on properties of the Higgs boson (H). Michał started his career at University of Warsaw, and spent a number of years working in leading centres such as LIP in Lisbon and LLR/Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau. Since 2013 he is the leader of the CMS group at NCBJ. Currently, Michał is continuing studies of properties of the Higgs boson using H→ττ decays. In particular, he is interested in measuring CP structure of the Higgs boson and tau lepton coupling. Michał is also coordinating a working group of the CMS experiment responsible for identification and calibration of reconstructed tau leptons.


Alina Czajka is a high-energy theorist whose interests focus on nuclear interactions governed by QCD. They aim at understanding phenomena studied experimentally in the biggest modern colliders, such as LHC, RHIC and future EIC. She tries to understand the 3-dimensional structure of a relativistic heavy nucleus by studying relevant scattering processes, such as deep inelastic process. Using the methods of small-x physics she investigates beyond-eikonal effects and calculate related corrections to different observables. She is also interested in the dynamics of quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions: especially in the impact of its initial phase on hard probes as well as in the transport and collective phenomena of later evolution stages.


Jan Czesław Dobrowolski is an expert in Chemistry and Molecular Modelling. His research interest include:

  • Computational chemistry of small molecules 
  • Physical organic chemistry – aromaticity, measures of chirality, substituent and incorporation effects 
  • Spectroscopy (IR and Raman) – and chiralooptical spectroscopy (VCD, ROA and ECD)
  • Mathematical chemistry – some aspects of graph theory and topological isomerism

Darko Donevski is an astrophysicist whose main research interests are the formation and evolution of dusty galaxies, high-redshift galaxies and quasars, circumgalactic mediumm as well as science communication. Before coming to NCBJ he worked at SISSA and the University of Toronto). He leads and co-leads observational studies that integrate data from NOEMA, ALMA, and JCMT SCUBA-2 telescopes with JWST observations. The primary goal of his research is to unravel the evolution of distant dusty galaxies, and its interpretation with state-of-the art models and simulations. Dr. Donevski is a member of Euclid, LSST and WST consortiums.


Anna Durkalec (Pearson) is an astrophysicist, whose main research interests include: observational cosmology, galaxy evolution, and statistical analyses of the large scale structure of the Universe – both theoretical and observational. Her recent work focuses on the studies of galaxy clustering dependencies within Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) models framework using high redshift galaxy surveys. She also work on improving classical models of halo occupation by adding more realistic descriptions of dark matter halo shape and mass distribution.

Stanisław Mrówczyński is a high-energy theorist whose research mostly concerns a theoretical description of relativistic heavy-ion collisions and quark-gluon plasma. He is particularly interested in the plasma which is out of thermodynamic equilibrium.


Agnieszka Pollo is an astrophysicist who focuses on research in observational cosmology, large-scale structure statistics of the Universe, galaxy evolution, multidimensional data analysis, and astroinformatics. She actively collaborates with scientists from various locations worldwide. She was a member of the steering committee of the VIPERS project and coordinates the Polish consortium for the LSST project, and co-leads the consortium of the POLAR-2 space project.


Michał Szleper is an experimental high-energy physicist. Following appointments at Northwestern University and the University of Edinburgh he joined the faculty at NCBJ in 2015. He has worked with the CMS group at CERN since 2005. His current research interests include electroweak physics, in particular vector boson scattering, CMS data analysis and phenomenology. He is also interested in studies for future colliders (ILC, FCC).

Michał Sznajder graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology and completed his Ph.D. at NCBJ, working on the COMPASS experiment at CERN. After a postdoctoral position at IPN Orsay, he returned to NCBJ to work in the Theoretical Physics Division. His main scientific interests include exploring the three-dimensional structure of hadrons within the framework of perturbative QCD. This, in particular, involves the description of so-called exclusive processes, the interpretation of existing data, and the preparation for future measurements.