Gayrat TOSHPULATOV defended his PhD thesis "Refined entropy method for Fokker-Planck equations with confinement", concluding his doctoral studies with distinction.

The topic of his thesis is the analytical investigation of kinetic Fokker-Planck equations. These are linear and nonlinear partial differential equations which are important e.g. in gas dynamics and plasma physics and also for the description of stochastic processes. The main theme of this work is the study of the large-time behavior of the solutions (in the limit as t goes to infinity), and particularly of the exponential convergence towards the unique steady state. For this convergence, explicit convergence rates (or estimates of it) are found. In some special cases these rates are sharp.

Anton ARNOLD, Fréderic HERAU (Nantes) and Christian SCHMEISER (Uni Wien) were the reviewers of his dissertation. Moreover Arnold and Schmeiser were also examinors in the PhD defense. In October, Dr. Toshpulatov will start a post-doc position at the University of Münster.