Rate My Professor Paul Zinn-Justin

Paul Zinn-Justin is Professor in Mathematical Physics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science, at the University of Melbourne. He joined the University in 2016 under an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship (FT150100232) and was promoted to full Professor (Level E) in 2019. Previously, he was a CNRS researcher in France, starting as a junior scientist in 2000 after short postdoctoral positions in the United States, and promoted to senior scientist in 2013. During his CNRS tenure, he worked at institutes in Paris and Moscow. Zinn-Justin studied at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and earned his PhD from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) in 1998.

His research focuses on the intersection of mathematical physics, algebra, and combinatorics, with specializations in quantum integrable and exactly solvable models, algebraic combinatorics, Schubert calculus, combinatorial aspects of algebraic geometry, random matrix theory, knot theory, and representation theory. He has established novel connections between quantum integrable systems and enumerative geometry and resolved several longstanding conjectures originating from the 1980s. Zinn-Justin's scholarship is evidenced by over 3,000 citations on Google Scholar. Key publications include 'Universality of correlation functions of Hermitian random matrices in an external field' (Communications in Mathematical Physics, 1998), 'Hybrid pipe dreams for the lower-upper scheme' (2025, with Allen Knutson), 'The trigonometric E-8 R-matrix' (Letters in Mathematical Physics), 'Honeycombs for Hall polynomials,' and 'Littlewood–Richardson coefficients for Grothendieck polynomials from integrability.' He has secured ARC Discovery Project funding, including a 2023 grant on shuffle algebras with colleagues. Additionally, Zinn-Justin contributes to open-source software development, notably the Macaulay2 system for computations in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.