The ALKAGE project mostly ran as expected, even though the COVID pandemic considerably slowed down some operations after February 2020, such as invitations and visits to other centers. In total, 7 PostDocs have been hired on ALKAGE grants during 2 year periods (one of them left after 1 year and a half, and another one after 1 year, as they were offered junior research positions abroad); 6 PhD students were supported, two of them by grants offered during the whole three years of their PhD research activity, and 5 PhD theses were defended before end of 2021.
During the period 2015-2021, very substantial work was conducted in the major research directions planned in the three work packages of the project described above. The PI, his PhD students, PostDocs and local collaborators all contributed to the activity by producing high level research papers, participating to conferences and delivering seminar talks or summer school lectures. The complete reference list includes about 80 publications. Numerous short expert visits (from one-two day visits to several months visits) to Institut Fourier have been supported. A substantial part of the budget has been used to support missions of the PI and his collaborators to various French and foreign institutions.
In total, four ALKAGE workshops of approximately 30 participants, and two bigger international conferences have been organized during the 6 years of the project. These events, each of a duration of one week, gave the occasion of many profitable exchanges, leading e.g. to a new collaboration of the PI with F. Campana, L. Darondeau and E. Rousseau. As mentioned in the previous section, the results that were obtained include important advances on several longstanding mathematical problems such as the Kobayashi conjecture from 1970.
The remarkable work conducted by Ya Deng during his PhD and by Siarhei Finski during his PostDoc allowed them to be both recruited by CNRS as Chargés de Recherche, in February and October 2021, respectively in Nancy and at École Polytechnique. All other younger collaborators of the ALKAGE project found junior academic positions after leaving Grenoble university: as assistant professors, YoungJun Choi at Pusan university (Korea), Tao Zheng at the Beijing Institute of Technology (China), Long Li at ShanghaiTech university (China), Philipp Naumann at Bayreuth Universität (Germany); Grégoire Menet, as ATER at Université de Lille; Juliana Restrepo, as PostDoc at Université Aix-Marseille.
