Former staff

Alexey Golovnev (b. 03 July 1980) is an Associate Professor at the high energy and elementary particle physics department. Married, three kids.

Dr. Golovnev has graduated from the high energy and elementary particle physics department of the St. Petersburg State University. He has obtained his bachelor (June 2000) and master (December 2002) degrees with honours. The PhD Thesis (28 December 2006) was devoted to some problems of quantization of systems with constraints, and to quantum mechanics on curved manifolds and submanifolds.

In 2007 - 2010 he worked at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. It was a very nice research collaboration with Prof. Mukhanov, one of the founders of the modern theory of cosmological perturbations. In a well-known paper by A. Golovnev, V. Mukhanov and V. Vanchurin, a model of vector inflation has been proposed. Later Dr. Golovnev has contributed to understanding the instabilities which are quite common to models of this sort.

Since September 2010, Dr. Golovnev is a faculty member at the high energy and elementary particle physics department.

His research interests are more inclined now towards a broad range of modified theories of gravity and their cosmological applications. The former include, for example, bimetric and metric-affine models, extensions with torsion and/or nonmetricity, mimetic gravity, teleparallel approaches, and massive gravity.

In March 2018 Dr. Golovnev has defended his Doctor of Sciences Thesis. This is the highest degree in Russian system. It, roughly speaking, allows to take a full professor position and is similar, for example, to Habilitation in Germany.