Speaker's profile: Lo ï c Merel is a professor at the University of Paris Saint Germain He obtained his doctoral degree under the guidance of Professor Joseph Oesterl é in 1993 His research areas involve modular forms, L-functions, Galois representations, Langlands programs, and more He proved the important result in 1996 that the twisted subgroups of elliptic curves defined on a fixed number field are uniformly finite, and was invited to give a 45 minute report on ICM in 1998 He also received awards such as EMS Prize (1996), the Blumenthal Award (1997), and Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand (1998).