2020 Mathematics Newsletter

Message from the Chair
 John Palmieri, Chair

It has certainly been an eventful time since our previous department newsletter in late 2019. Late in Winter Quarter 2020, we quickly switched to online teaching and advising -- indeed, all departmental operations -- and I am very thankful for the work everyone put in to make this happen. It wasn't easy, but our faculty, staff, postdocs, and students all did more than their share.

In this newsletter, you can read about many honors and awards: Julie Zhang was named the Dean's Medalist for the Natural Sciences in June 2020. Tatiana Toro was awarded the 2020 Blackwell-Tapia Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gunther Uhlmann won the 2021 Birkhoff Prize. Chris Burdzy was named the President-Elect of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Bobby Wilson was named as one of the inaugural Karen EDGE fellows. You can find details about these great achievements and more in the rest of the newsletter. Congratulations to all!

Three faculty members retired last year: Don Marshall, Jim Morrow, and Paul Smith. They have all had long, successful careers in our department, affecting many students and colleagues over the years, and their contributions will be missed. Faculty members may choose to continue teaching after retirement, and Don has made that choice. The other two are focusing on other activities, mathematical and otherwise.

We hired six new faculty this year! We have five new assistant professors: Isabel Vogt, Stefan Steinerberger, Gaku Liu, Eric Larson, and Alexis Drouot. Zhixu Su joins us as an Acting Assistant Professor, and we also have a group of new postdocs: Silvia Ghinassi, Giovanni Inchiostro, Masahiro Nakahara, Harry Richman, and Yang Zhang. This is not the easiest year to start a new job, but we are very happy to have all of them here.

We look forward to vaccines, eventually resuming in-person operations, and seeing everyone in our mathematical community face-to-face. Until then, see you on Zoom!

- John Palmieri

The 2021 AMS-SIAM George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics was awarded to Gunther Uhlmann for his fundamental and insightful contributions to inverse problems and partial differential equations, as well as for his incisive work on boundary rigidity, microlocal analysis and cloaking. Uhlmann’s work is distinguished by its mathematical beauty and relevance to many significant applications, especially in medical imaging, seismic… Read more
The Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) announced this year's recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize is Craig McKibben & Sarah Merner Professor of Mathematics Tatiana Toro. The biennial Blackwell-Tapia Prize was established in 2002 by the Mathematical and… Read more
Bobby Wilson has been named one of three inaugural fellows for the 2020 Karen EDGE Fellowship.  He is joined by Pamela Harris, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and Mohamed Omar, Associate Professor at Harvey Mudd College. The Karen EDGE Fellowship Program was established with a generous gift… Read more
Chris Burdzy has been named President-Elect of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He will spend one year as President-Elect, then a year as President, then a year as Past President. In a brief statement, Burdzy writes "I am greatly honored by being nominated for the IMS President. Big Data presents both challenges for and opportunities to statistics. In my opinion, it also presents new opportunities for the statistical and… Read more
Alexis Drouot joined the department as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2020. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Maciej Zworski. Alexis then held a postdoctoral position at Columbia University. Alexis's current research lies at the interface between partial differential equations and mathematical physics. He strongly enjoys discovering new topics and introducing students to research. Besides mathematics, Alexis loves hiking, biking and… Read more
Zhixu Su joined the department as an acting assistant professor in Autumn 2020. Before coming to the UW, Zhixu was a senior lecturer at Indiana University Bloomington. She has also taught at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and University of California Irvine. Zhixu received her BS degree in mathematics from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2003 and her doctoral degree at Indiana University in 2009, under the supervision of Jim Davis. Her research interests lie in the area of geometric… Read more
Silvia Ghinassi received her PhD from Stony Brook University in 2019 under the supervision of Raanan Schul. Her area of research is in geometric measure theory and its interplay with harmonic analysis. She will be working with Tatiana Toro. Giovanni Inchiostro received his PhD from Brown University in 2020 under the supervision of Dan Abramovich. His area of research is in moduli spaces in algebraic geometry. He will be working with Jarod… Read more
Article courtesy of Nancy Joseph | PERSPECTIVES Each year, the College honors four graduating students — one from each of its four divisions — as Dean’s Medalists, based on academic performance and faculty recommendations. See why this year’s four recipients, who together represent eight Arts &… Read more
DOCTORATE: Chi-Yu Cheng (advisor: Jarod Alper) | Postdoc at University of Missouri - Columbia Dissertation: Variation of Instability in Invariant Theory Nikolaos Eptaminitakis (Robin Graham & Gunther Uhlmann) | Golomb Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue Geodesic X-ray Transform on Asymptotically Hyperbolic Manifolds Graham W. Gordon (Sara Billey) | Mathematics Teacher at Proof School Cycle type factorizations in the finite general… Read more
Scholarship Recipients John and Kathy Connors Foundation Endowed Scholarship in Mathematics: Bashir Abdel-Fattah | Derek Johnson | Gian Rodrigues Thomas P. Bleakney Endowed Scholarship in Mathematics: Shea Engle | Sophia Taylor | Josie Thompson Mathematics Endowed Scholarship: Daniel Humphreys | Yanway Lai | Richard Phan | Roark Wolf | Dafang Ye Clara M. McGee Endowed Scholarship in Mathematics: Michaela Coontz Barbara Sando Scholarship in Mathematics: Yeu Chen | Frances Herr | Siye Li | Alana… Read more
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