Phillip Griffiths will give the 2012 Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Lectures, to be held on April 4 and 5, 2012. On Wednesday April 4, there will be a reception from 3:30-4:30 pm in the Lobby of the Davidson Conference Center, followed by a Lecture from 4:30-5:30 in the Board Room at the Davidson Conference Center. On Thursday April 5, there will be a reception from 3:00-3:30 pm in Kaprielian Hall 410, followed by a Lecture from 3:30-4:30 in Kaprielian Hall 414. For more information about the lecture, see the poster.

Christine Ann Shoemaker was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors in the engineering profession. Professor Shoemaker received her PhD in Mathematics from our department in 1971, under the direction of Richard Bellman. She is the Joseph P. Ripley Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. More details on her distinguished career and her accomplishments can be found in Cornell's press release.

Congratulations to the graduate students who received their PhD in 2011! These include: Dima Chebotarov, Jianfu Chen, Mihaela Ignatova, Wei Lin, Wei Liu, Ednei Reis, Paul Sobaje, Minzhao Tan, Xinyang Wang, Youngyun Yun,  Changyong Zhang, Changlong Zhong.

Jianfu currently works for Union Bank of California, Mihaela is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California at Riverside, Wei Lin is a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, Wei Liu works for American Express, Paul holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Melbourne, Minzhao accepted a position at Merril Lynch, Xinyang works for Morgan Stanley, and Changlong is a postdoc at the University of Ottawa.

Congratulations to Hong Yin, previously an Assistant Professor NTT, who is now an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Brockport.

The first Mathematical Congress of the Americas will take place in Mexico in 2013. Susan Friedlander is one of the principal organisers of this quadrennial Congress. For more information, see the poster.

Francis Bonahon succeeds Gary Rosen as Department Chair. Rosen’s 6 year term as Chair coincided with a particularly propitious time for the department. Several outstanding new faculty members were hired during that period. Among other notable accomplishments, Rosen led the department through a very successful external review, which confirmed the high quality of the mathematics programs at USC, and was instrumental in facilitating the move of the whole department from Denney Research Building to Kaprielian Hall, which greatly improved its physical environment.

Sami Assaf, scheduled to join the department in August 2012, studies algebraic combinatorics and combinatorial representation theory.