I am an assistant professor (with a tenure track) in probability theory at the University of Groningen. I am also affiliated with the interdisciplinary centre CogniGron of mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and material engineers that aim to improve learning-based cognitive computing with materials-centred systems.
My research is supported by a European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. I also won the Royal Statistical Society's prize for UK's best applied probability PhD thesis of 2022 and 2023.
Before moving to Groningen, I was a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University in the research group of Prof. Louigi Addario-Berry, where I was funded by a CRM-ISM Postdoctoral Fellowship. I completed my PhD at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Christina Goldschmidt, where I was also a Stipendiary Lecturer at St. Hugh's College.
Most of my research involves random trees and random graphs, and I sometimes do some probabilistic combinatorics as well. I like cute sampling procedures and bijections.
I am currently supervising the research projects of Elaine Herrera (PhD), Jeroen van Haastert (MSc), Peteris Silins (MSc) and Géon Lukens (BSc)
s.a. lastname @ rug.nl
You can find me in office 436 in the Bernoulliborg.
I am happy to supervise bachelor or master students from Groningen or elsewhere that want to work on a question in discrete probability theory. Together, we can look for a topic that we are both interested in. Feel free to send an email or to drop by my office!
I teach Introduction to Graph Theory for first-year bachelor students and Combinatorial Mathematics B (on random graphs) for first and second-year master students. In February, I will be an invited professor at ENS Paris, where I will teach a mini-course on local and global convergence of random trees
With Cecília Salgado and Lara Vicino, we organize a monthly lunch meeting for female and non-binary identifying master students and academic staff in (applied) mathematics in Groningen. Send me an email if you are interested in attending!
Research visit UniDistance, August-September 2025, Brig, Switzerland
Mathematics Colloquium UniDistance, September 2025, Brig, Switzerland
CIRM Workshop `Combinatorics and Discrete Probability', November 2025, Luminy, France
Invited Professorship, École Normale Superieure Paris, February 2026, Paris, France
Probability Colloquium, École Normale Superieure Paris, February 2026, Paris, France
CWI Themed Semester on phase transitions in probability, combinatorics and algorithms, March-May 2026, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, organiser
BIRS workshop 'Discrete and continuous random trees' , November 2026, Oaxaca, Mexico
Michal Bassan, Serte Donderwinkel, Brett Kolesnik, To see the forest for the trees: On the infinite divisibility of unlabeled forests, 2025, arXiv:2507.16650
Louigi Addario-Berry, Serte Donderwinkel, Christina Goldschmidt, Rivka Mitchell, Discrete snakes with globally centered displacements, 2025, arXiv:2505.21823
Anna Brandenberger, Serte Donderwinkel, Céline Kerriou, Gàbor Lugosi, Rivka Mitchell, Temporal connectivity of Random Geometric Graphs, 2025, arXiv:2502.15274
Serte Donderwinkel and Robin Khanfir, Tight universal bounds on the height times the width of random trees, 2024, arXiv:2501.00458
Michal Bassan, Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik , Tournament score sequences, Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv numbers, and the Lévy-Khintchine method, 2024, arXiv:2407.01441
Michal Bassan, Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik, Graphical sequences and plane trees, 2024, arXiv:2406.05110
Louigi Addario-Berry, Marie Albenque, Serte Donderwinkel and Robin Khanfir, Refined Horton-Strahler numbers I: a discrete bijection, 2024, arXiv:2406.03025
Louigi Addario-Berry, Simon Briend, Luc Devroye, Serte Donderwinkel, Gábor Lugosi and Céline Kerriou, Random friend trees, 2024, arXiv:2403.20185
Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik, Asymptotics for Sinaĭ excursions, 2024, arXiv:2403.12941
Serte Donderwinkel and Brett Kolesnik, Tournaments and random walks, 2024, arxiv:2403.12940
Louigi Addario-Berry, Serte Donderwinkel and Igor Kortchemski, Annales Henri Lebesgue, 8: 113--149 (2025), DOI: 10.5802/ahl.231
Paul Balister, Serte Donderwinkel, Carla Groenland, Tom Johnston and Alex Scott, Counting graphic sequences via integrated random walks, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 378: 4627--4669 (2025), DOI: 10.1090/tran/9403
Louigi Addario-Berry and Serte Donderwinkel, Random trees have height O(√n), Annals of Probability. 52(6): 2238-2280 (2024), DOI: 10.1214/24-AOP1694
Louigi Addario-Berry, Arthur Blanc-Renaudie, Serte Donderwinkel, Mickaël Maazoun, and James Martin, The Foata–Fuchs proof of Cayley’s formula, and its probabilistic uses, Electron. Commun. Probab. 28: 1-13 (2023), DOI: 10.1214/23-ECP523
Serte Donderwinkel and Zheneng Xie, Universality for the directed configuration model: metric space convergence of the strongly connected components at criticality, Electronic Journal of Probability. 29: 1-85 (2024), DOI:10.1214/24-EJP1131
Serte Donderwinkel, Height process convergence of supercritical Galton-Watson forests, with an application to the configuration model in the critical window, Advances in Applied Probability. 56, 1064–1105 (2024), DOI: 10.1017/apr.2024.3
The structure of large random graphs, PhD Thesis, August 2022, supervised by Christina Goldschmidt
The ant in the labyrinth, written in April 2018 as part of Part iii of the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Perla Sousi, primarily based on a paper by Noam Berger, Nina Gantert and Yuval Peres
Stein's method applied to preferential attachment graphs, written in June 2016 as part of BSc in Mathematics at the University of Groningen, supervised by Daniel Rodrigues-Valesin and Aernout van Enter, primarily based on a paper by Nathan Ross