João Fragoso Melo

Hello! I am theoretical physicist with a love for teaching. I am from Sintra in Portugal (also known as the most beautiful place on Earth), and started out my journey studying Engineering Physics at IST, University of Lisbon. I went on to do my Master’s and PhD in DAMTP, University of Cambridge; and I was also a Postdoc at ITF, KU Leuven. You can find out details of my research here.

I love teaching Physics be it in a classroom at a university or to the general audience. I have written a number of pedagogical lecture notes here. You can also find my popular science writing here (beware, a lot of them are in Portuguese).

My expertise lies in renormalisation—the study of how physical theories are related at different length/energy scales. One usually studies specific theories to explain a number of phenomena, but with renormalisation one can study the structure of the space of theories, allowing us to understand which theories are more or less useful. I am particularly interested in studying the intersection of the quantum and the gravitational under the lenz of renormalisation. Does our intuition for effective field theories hold when the scales themselves are dynamical? Only one way to find out.