Department of Mathematics
Welcome to the Department of Mathematics at USC Dornsife. We offer a wide range of research and education opportunities in pure and applied mathematics. We also form a lively and engaged community of scholars. Please explore our website, from student resources to faculty personal pages, from math clubs to research seminars, to learn more about us and about our offerings and activities.

Seminars/Colloquia


Tenure-Track positions
The Department of Mathematics in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, seeks to hire two tenure-track positions at the Assistant Professor level. The anticipated start date of this position is August 2024.
Candidates in all fields of mathematics, applied mathematics, and mathematical statistics will be considered.
News
USC Graduate Program Information Session
Register here for our virtual open house for prospective graduate students on Thursday, October 26, 2023 from 4-6pm.
The deadline to apply for Fall 2024 admission is December 15, 2023. Apply here.
Juhi Jang receives Best Paper Award as part of the Frontiers of Science awards
Congratulations to Juhi Jang on her work being selected for a Best Paper Award in Mathematics (in Partial Differential Equations) as part of the Frontiers of Science Awards.

Congratulations to our PhD students who graduated in 2022-23
Nineteen graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2022-23. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.
- Abdullah Karakus (Alexander)
- Alexander Sahakian (Ganatra), Lecturer, USC
- Andrew Lowy (Razaviyayn/Minsker), Research Associate at Inst for Foundations of Data Science (IFDS), University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Aykut Arslan (Lv), Lecturer, USC
- Daniel Lundstrom (Minsker)
- Debtanu Sen (Ganatra), Quant Analyst, Trailstone Renewables GmBH
- Gin Park (Haydn), Mathematics Instructor, CMS (Creverse, Seoul, So Korea)
- Grant Bowling (Assaf)
- Henry Ehrhard (Assaf)
- Jan Ernest (JE) Paguyo (Fulman), Britton Postdoc Fellow, McMaster University
- Kayla Orlinsky (Montgomery), Lecturer, USC
- Lijia Wang (Goldstein/Tong), Assistant Professor (TT), City University of Hong Kong
- Linfeng Li (Jang/Kukavica), Hedrick Asst Adjunct Professor, UCLA
- Maria Allayioti (Rosen), Data Scientist, Cognomotiv
- Mark Ebert (Lauda), Postdoc, UCLA
- Melih Iseri (Zhang), Assistant Professor (NTT), University of Michigan
- Shiyun Wang (Panova), Dunham-Jackson Postdoc Associate, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Shunan Yao (Minsker/Tong), Assistant Professor (TT), Hong Kong Baptist University
- Ying Tan (Ma), Visiting Assistant Professor, UC Santa Barbara
Cris Negron has received an NSF CAREER award
Cris Negron has received an NSF CAREER award for his project “Homotopical representation theory and TQFTs.” This is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for early career faculty and will support Negron’s research at the intersections of representation theory, geometry, and mathematical physics. The project will investigate derived categories of quantum group representations and their appearances in low dimensional topological field theories.

Susan Montgomery’s contributions in noncommutative algebra are covered extensively in the Notices of the AMS. The article covers her professional journey along with a discussion of her research accomplishments through the course of her long and decorated career. Click here to read more.
Virtual open house for incoming Ph.D. students
The mathematics department held its open house for incoming Fall 2023 Ph.D. students on Thursday, February 23, 2023. To view the recording, please click here.
Aaron Lauda secured an $8 million Simons Foundation grant to push the boundaries of knowledge about our universe and open doors to advances now depicted only in science fiction.
Eric Friedlander was the Distinguished Speaker at the Maurice Auslander Distinguished Lectures, Oct 29-30, 2022, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Quissett Campus, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA.
Aaron Lauda received the prestigious Senior Raubenheimer Award
The Albert S. Raubenheimer Award is awarded in recognition of outstanding teaching, scholarship and service within the university.

Susan Montgomery gave the Block lecture at UC Riverside
Susan Montgomery gave the Richard Block Distinguished Lecture in Mathematics at UC Riverside on May 25, 2022. Her title was “Orthogonal representations: from groups to Hopf Algebras to tensor categories.’’ Click here for the flyer.

Congratulations to our PhD students who graduated in 2021-22
Sixteen graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2021-22. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.
- Harrison Algra (Wang), Data Scientist, Thrackle
- Irmak Balcik (Kamienny), Postdoc, Univ of Texas, Austin
- Peter Kagey (Assaf), Visiting Asst Prof, Harvey Mudd College
- Jinting Liu (Bartroff, Sun), Data Scientist, MobilityWare Inc.
- David Massatt (Kukavica), Mathematician/Numerical Analyst, Aerospace Corporation
- Clemens Oszkinat (Rosen), Actuary, HansMerkur Insurance Company
- Jiyeon Park (Newton), Postdoc, University of Utah
- Austin Pollok (Zhang), Assistant Professor of Clinical Data Science and Operations, USC Marshall School
- Alexander Port (Asok), Data Scientist, Thrackle
- Apoorva Shah (Lototsky), Data Scientist, Neal Analytics
- Maxwell C. Siegel (Kamienny, Haydn)
- Jihoon Sohn (Bonahon)
- Alex Tarter (Goldstein), Statistician, NASS US Dept of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service
- Christopher Wayne Walker (Goldstein), Senior Engineer, Northrup Gruman
- Lang Wang (Minsker), Data Scientist, MobilityWare Inc.
- Yusheng Wu (Lototsky, Tong)
Harold Williams receives NSF Career Award
Harold Williams has received an NSF CAREER Award, “Cluster Algebras in Representation Theory, Geometry, and Physics.” Among the foundation’s most prestigious awards, the CAREER grant will support Williams’ research on representation theory, algebraic geometry, and symplectic geometry, using ideas from the theory of cluster algebras to develop new connections among them and to mathematical physics. It will also support an annual graduate summer school, the Los Angeles Workshop on Representations and Geometry, held on the USC campus.

Aravind Asok lectures at 2022 ICM
Aravind Asok gave an invited lecture in the algebraic geometry section at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians jointly with Jean Fasel (Universite Joseph Fourier – Grenoble). While the ICM, initially planned for St. Petersburg, was reincarnated as a virtual event due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several in-person “overlay” events were scheduled. Asok and Fasel spoke at an overlay event in Zurich that included the algebraic geometry and number theory sections. The talk, entitled “Vector bundles on algebraic varieties,” surveyed recent progress in the theory of vector bundles on algebraic varieties and related questions in algebraic K-theory.
