Dr van Garrel grew up in the German part of Switzerland speaking
French at home. He did his undergraduate studies at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology Lausanne with his Master thesis in number
theory done with Prof. Ken Ribet at the University of California
Berkeley.

After that he went for his doctoral studies to the California
Institute of Technology to work with Prof. Tom Graber, one of the
pioneers of Gromov-Witten theory. The completion of his PhD was
followed by some postdoctoral positions. For the first he was a member
of a thematic program on Calabi-Yau varieties at the Fields Institute
in Toronto. Then he was a researcher at the Korea Institute for
Advanced Study in Seoul. During that time, partly through the
organization of 3 conferences on it, he learned the Gross-Siebert
program, which then earned him a post with Prof. Bernd Siebert at the
University of Hamburg.

This was followed by an EU Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Fellowship at the
University of Warwick with Prof. Miles Reid FRS. After a 4 month
visitor stay at the Institute for Theoretical Studies of ETH Zurich
visiting the group of Prof. Rahul Pandharipande, he started his
current post at the University of Birmingham.

• Enumerative Geometry: Log Gromov-Witten theory, how it relates to other curve counting theories and to Mirror Constructions.
• Birational Geometry: Rationality Questions in Gross-Siebert families.
• Gross-Siebert programme, Mirror Constructions and Mirror Symmetry Results.