Valerio Toledano Laredo received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1997. After working for almost ten years at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, he joined Northeastern in 2006. His research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation since 2007. Currently, he is also the Principal Investigator on a $2.3M NSF Research and Training Grant, which involves several faculty in the areas of Algebraic Geometry, Representation Theory and Mathematical Physics. Professor Toledano’s research lies at the interface of these three areas, and focusses particularly on quantum groups, and their relation to differential equations with regular and irregular singularities. He was elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019.