Our team has two new members from this academic year: associate professor Christian Pfeifer and postdoctoral researcher Maykoll Anthonny Reyes Hung. Welcome!

Christian Pfeifer obtained his PhD in 2013 at the II Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Hamburg, with the thesis “The Finsler Spacetime Framework: Backgrounds For Physics Beyond Metric Geometry”. He then worked at the Leibniz University Hannover, the University of Tartu in Estonia, and from 2020 to 2026 at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) of the University of Bremen. His research focuses on theoretical physics beyond standard metric geometry: Finsler spacetimes, modified dispersion relations, and quantum gravity phenomenology. He joined the Faculty of Physics of the University of Rijeka as an associate professor.

Maykoll Reyes Hung obtained his PhD in physics at the University of Zaragoza (Centro de Astropartículas y Física de Altas Energías, CAPA), where he worked on quantum gravity phenomenology through searches for possible departures from special relativity, Lorentz invariance violation and doubly special relativity, in the propagation of high-energy astroparticles such as cosmic neutrinos and gamma rays. At the Faculty of Physics he is carrying out the postdoctoral project “Collinear Approximation of Photon Interactions in a Consistent Lorentz-Violating Extension”, funded by the Croatian Science Foundation within the call PDIP-2026.

More about our team members can be found on the Team page.