From the AMS Press release
Bianca Viray, a professor at the University of Washington, has been awarded the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars for the 2022–2023 academic year. The fellowship gives exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion is the excellence of the candidate's research.
An arithmetic geometer, Viray researches rational points on varieties, particularly how a variety’s geometric properties influence failures of the local-to-global principle. “My research projects are broadly motivated by wanting to understand arithmetic properties of a variety as we extend the base field, and what the sets of points look like over extensions,” she said.
Recently, Viray has studied degree d points, considering solubility over unions of extensions of bounded or prescribed degree. During her fellowship year, she will take part in a program on Diophantine geometry at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Viray will also host collaborators including Brendan Creutz of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).
“I am honored to be awarded this prestigious fellowship in recognition of my research and thankful for my many wonderful mentors, collaborators, and colleagues who have supported me through my career,” she said.
Viray earned her PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley. She was at Brown University from 2010 until 2014 as a Tamarkin Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 2014. In the 2021–2022 academic year, she is a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
An active organizer in the mathematics community, Viray is a co-founder of the paraDIGMS (Diversity in Graduate Mathematical Sciences) initiative and a member of the board of directors of Girls’ Angle. She is also a member at large of the AMS Council and a Fellow of the AMS. Read a Simons Foundation profile of Viray, who was named a 2020 Simons Fellow in Mathematics.
About the Fellowship
The AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars, established in 2017 with a gift from Joan and Joseph Birman, seeks to address the paucity of women at the highest levels of research in mathematics by giving exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion for the Birman Fellowship is the excellence of the candidate's research. See past recipients and read about their experiences with the fellowship (PDF).
Contact: AMS Communications.