Marco Brunella (Varese Italy 1964, Rio de Janeiro Brazil 2012) was a doctoral student at SISSA, Trieste, where he defended his thesis on dynamical systems under the direction of Alberto Verjovsky : Expansive Flows on Three-Manifolds (1992). In the beginning of his career, he studied many aspects of foliation theory and dynamical systems, on which he published approximately ten papers. Then, motivated by the fascinating problem of « minimal exceptional sets for holomorphic foliations of CP2 », he turned his research to the study of complex foliations, on which a large part of his work was based.
He developed several tools in both analytic geometry and algebraic geometry. His profound understanding of sophisticated theories of various domains enabled him to bring new insights into many problems of analytic geometry and holomorphic foliations. Marco Brunella spent most of his career as a Chargé de Recherche at the CNRS at the University of Bourgogne. He died suddenly during a stay in Rio de Janeiro, a city which he loved, where he was visiting friends and colleagues of IMPA.
His family has generously donated funds from his estate to the « Institut de Mathématiques de Bourgogne » (IMB) in order to participate in the development of mathematics in honor of Marco. We therefore have decided to use a part of these funds to create the « Brunella post-doctoral fellowship ».