News Bulletin

Robert Guralnick was the Rothschild Distinguished Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for the program Groups, representations and applications: new perspectives and gave the Rothschild Lecture on July 26, 2022 during the workshop, Simple groups, representations and applications, “which celebrated the great influence of the work of Michael Aschbacher and Robert Guralnick.”

Aaron Lauda will be the director of a large, prestigious Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant in Mathematical and Physical Science entitled “New Structures in low dimension Topology.” This collaboration brings together experts from diverse mathematical backgrounds to advance our understanding of smooth topology in 3 and 4-dimensions. The international team of researchers includes Cris Negron as well as researchers from Caltech, UCLA, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, and several international universities.

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.

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 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 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.

Robert Guralnick was the Rothschild Distinguished Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for the program Groups, representations and applications: new perspectives and gave the Rothschild Lecture on July 26, 2022 during the workshop, Simple groups, representations and applications, “which celebrated the great influence of the work of Michael Aschbacher and Robert Guralnick.”

Aaron Lauda will be the director of a large, prestigious Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant in Mathematical and Physical Science entitled “New Structures in low dimension Topology.” This collaboration brings together experts from diverse mathematical backgrounds to advance our understanding of smooth topology in 3 and 4-dimensions. The international team of researchers includes Cris Negron as well as researchers from Caltech, UCLA, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, and several international universities.

The Los Angeles Workshop on Representations and Geometry is a new annual workshop which aims to bring together graduate students and postdocs interested in representation theory, geometry, and related subjects. LAWRGe will be held from 6/6/22 to 6/10/22 at the University of Southern California. The 2022 topic will be the relationship between Schubert calculus and quantum integrable systems developed in the papers Schubert Puzzles and Integrability I and II of Knutson and Zinn-Justin, who will also be lead mentors for the workshop.

The mathematics department held it’s open house for admitted Fall 2022 Ph.D. students on Wednesday, March 2, 2022.  For video, click here

Research Awards / Research Prizes:

Edward and Dolores Blum prize to Clemens Oszkinat

Dennis Ray Estes prize to Irmak Balcik

Theodore Edward Harris prize to Lifeng Li

Teaching Prizes:

Dennis Ray Estes prize to Peter Kagey

Theodore Edward Harris prize to Austin Pollok

Department of Mathematics Undergraduate Awards:

Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Senior Award 2022 to Yibin Xiong

Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Junior Award 2022 to Alan Goldfarb

Department of Mathematics Outreach Award 2022 to Ajay Srinivasan

Fifteen graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2020-21. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.

• Asserian, Lernik (Rosen), Lecturer, Stanford University
• Dai, Zheng (Rosen), Biostatistician, Medtronic Inc
• Feng, Pengbin (Ma/Zhang), Research Scientist, Amazon
• Gangopadhyay, Ujan (Alexander), Postdoc, NUS (Natl Univ of Singapore)
• Hawekotte, Keenan (Rosen), Machine Learning Engr, Searchable.ai
• Lu, Yu Leo (Wang), Data scientist, Northrop Grumman
• Luo, Jiajun (Minsker), Didi Labs
• Luo, Man (Ma), Quant research, Guotai Junan Seurities Asset Mgmt
• Quijada, Danjoseph (Assaf), Lecturer, USC
• Rahmani, Arash John (Fulman), Data Scientist, Accenture
• Rickard, Calum (Jang), Arthur J Krener Asst Prof, UC Davis
• Wickham, Zachary (Ziane), Lecturer, USC
• Wu, Wenqian (Ma), Quant Trader, Guotai Junan Securities
• Yao, Mengsha (Rosen), Postdoc, Temple University
• Zhu, Zimu (Zhang), Postdoc UCSB

The professors at the department of mathematics would like to extend best wishes to the graduating class of 2021!! Click here for a short video!

Research Awards / Research Prizes:

Edward and Dolores Blum prize to Mengsha Yao

Dennis Ray Estes prize to Calum Rickard

Theodore Edward Harris prize to Zimu Zhu

Teaching Prizes:

Dennis Ray Estes prize to Alex Port

Theodore Edward Harris prize to Apoorva Shah

Department of Mathematics Undergraduate Awards:

Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Senior Award 2021 to Joshua Speckman

Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Junior Award 2021 to Larry Gu

Department of Mathematics Outreach Award 2021 to Rafael Espinosa Mena

Yu Deng, has received a Sloan Research Fellowship. The two-year fellowship, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to the field. Click here for more information.

Sheel Ganatra has received an NSF career Award for a project titled Fukaya categories and Noncommutative Hodge structures. Among the foundation’s most prestigious awards, the career grant will support Ganatra’s research on systematic frameworks for computing invariants in symplectic geometry and mirror symmetry coming from pseudoholomorphic curve theory.

Professor Stanislav Minsker has received an NSF career Award for a project titled Robust and Efficient Algorithms for Statistical Estimation and Inference. Among the foundation’s most prestigious awards, the career grant will support Minsker’s development of statistical and machine learning methods possessing two important characteristics, robustness and efficiency.

A virtual open house event was held on Wednesday 3rd March 2021.  Class visits, poster session and visiting with faculty were arranged for our admitted Fall 2021 Ph.D. students.  Click here for the video.

Susan Friedlander’s Contributions in Mathematical Fluid Dynamics is highlighted in the Notices of the AMS. The review focuses her work on hydrodynamic instability as it relates to the transition from laminar to turbulent flow, on dyadic models in fluid dynamics and Onsager’s conjecture analyzing the transfer of energy in turbulent flows, and on magnetohydrodynamics as it relates to large-scale motions in Earth’s fluid core. Click here for the research paper.

Mike Waterman has received the 2020 William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics. The prize, awarded to a single person for a body of research and lifetime achievement, recognizes outstanding mathematical contributions that have had a direct and fundamental impact on scientific, business, finance, and engineering applications through their research.

Thirteen graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2019-20. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.

• Aronowitz, Julian (Bartroff), Data Scientist, Palo Alto Networks
• Douglas, Daniel (Bonahon), Postdoc associate, Yale (1 yr), Gibbs Assistant Professor Yale (2 yrs)
• Gang, Bowen (Minsker), Assistant Professor (TT), Fudan University, Stat Department
• He, Xinrui (Bartroff), Data Scientist, Google
• McKemmie, Eilidh (Guralnick), Postdoc, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1 yr)
• Ozdemir, Alperen (Fulman), Hale visiting Asst Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology (3 yrs)
• Phonsom, Chukiat (Mikulevicius), NLP research, Alexandria Technology, Research and Investment
• Ruan, Jie (Zhang), Research Scientist, Facebook
• Temirgaliyeva, Zhanerke (Ziane), Lecturer, University of Colorado Boulder (1 yr)
• Wang, Weinan (Kukavica), Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Arizona (2020-2023). Postdoc MSRI, Spring 2021
• Wu, Hao (Zhang)
• Yang, Jiaowen (Teng), Research Scientist, Facebook.
• Zhang, Dong (Bonahon), Quantitative Analyst, Western Asset.

The faculty and staff of Mathematics department would like to congratulate the graduating class of 2020. Click here for a short video.

The Mathematics Department held its Award Ceremony on May 8, 2020, to celebrate the achievements of some of its undergraduate and graduate students.  The event was of course held online this year. Click here for the video.

Graduate Research Prizes:

• The 2020 Edward and Dolores Blum Prize is awarded to Weinan Wang
• The 2020 Theodore Edward Harris Prize is awarded to John Rahmani
• The 2020 Dennis Ray Estes Prize is awarded to Dan Douglas

Graduate Teaching Prizes:

• The 2020 Theodore Edward Harris Prize is awarded to Keenan Hawekotte
• The 2020 Dennis Ray Estes Prize is awarded to Calum Rickard

University Prize:

Beyond the Department, Zhanerke Temirgaliyeva received the University-wide Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. Click here for a short clip.

Undergraduate Prizes (video link here):

• The 2020 Al and Teresa Zobrist Senior Award for Excellence in Mathematics is awarded to Tavi Zeir
• The 2020 Al and Teresa Zobrist Junior Award for Excellence in Mathematics is awarded to Joshua Speckman
• The 2020 Outreach Award of the USC Department of Mathematics is awarded to Isaac Gelman

Congratulations to all of them!

Aaron Ghrist and Stephen Jon Quiton, both majoring in Applied and Computational Mathematics, are two of the four USC undergraduates who have been awarded a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship. Aaron is a junior double majoring in Applied and Computational Mathematics and in Chemistry. Stephen is also a junior, double majoring in Applied and Computational Mathematics and in Chemical Engineering.

See the USC Dornsife article for more details on Aaron and Stephen’s achievements, as well as on the other two USC awardees. The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation was established by Congress in 1986, and recognizes college sophomores and juniors who show exceptional promise of becoming research leaders in the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics.

Congratulations to Aaron and Stephen!

Prof. Susan Montgomery is also co-organizing the event.

Click here for more information.

Seven graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2018-19. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.

• Wintner, Moses (Rosen), Data Scientist, Kaiser Permanante Health Innovation Studio
• Wiroonsri, Nathakhun (Goldstein), Instructor, King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi
• Sandoval Gonzalez, Nicolle (Lauda/Assaf), UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA
• Xu, Fanhui (Mikulevicius), Postdoctoral Associate (NTT), Carnegie Mellon University, (3 yrs)
• Demirkaya, Emre (Goldstein), Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• Kleen, Viktor (Asok), Postdoc (NTT), University Duisburg-Essen, (3 yrs)
• Li, Shuang (Rosen), Data Scientist, Warner Bros. Entertainment

Prof. Robert Guralnick was a plenary speaker at the joint AMS-VMS meeting in Quy Nhon, Vietnam, which was held June 10-13, 2019.

Click Here for more information.

The Simons foundation is proud to support the work of distinguished scientists by granting them fellowships.

Click Here for more information.

The conference is organized by Mathematics Department of Northeastern University.
Maurice Auslander Distinguished Lectures Date: April 27 – 28, 2019
International Conference Date: April 24 – 29, 2019
Location: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Quissett Campus, Woods Hole, MA

Click Here for more information.

Prof. Juhi Jang, Prof. Yu Deng and Prof. Igor Kukavica are organizing a summer school on recent advances in mathematical fluid dynamics which will take place from May 20-24, 2019. Click Here for poster.

A trailblazer in computational biology, Michael Waterman, recently elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, got an unlikely start in life. [5 min read]

Please Click Here for more information.

Please click here for more information.

Click here for more information
Fall 2018

The 9th Western Conference on Mathematical Finance will be held at University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, on November 16-17, 2018 at Taper Hall(THH 201,THH 301) 

The 2018 K-Theory Foundation Prizes were given at the K-theory Meeting in Argentina, a satellite meeting preceding the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) next week in Rio de Janeiro.
Please click on this link for more information:  citations and information about the K-Theory Foundation Prize.

Profs. Jay Bartroff and Larry Goldstein were chosen by the Commissioner of Major League Baseball (MLB) to be part of a committee of mathematicians, statisticians, and physicists to study MLB’s recent surge in home runs. The committee studied vast amounts of game data, performed laboratory tests on balls, visited the Rawlings manufacturing facility, and made recommendations to MLB and Rawlings for future monitoring, testing, and storage of baseballs.

Prof. Eric Friedlander, Chair of the US National Committee/Mathematics leads the US delegation to the 2018 General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union in Sao Paulo. Prof Susan Friedlander will represent the Mathematical Congress of Americas at this event.

Article “Focus on the Scientist: Robert Guralnick” (Page 5) written by Aner Shalev is an inspiration for young minds.

Associate Professor Greta Panova

Assistant Professor Yu Deng

Among their other awards are IMO Medals Greta Panova (a gold and two silver medals), Yu Deng (a gold medal and a Putnam Fellow), Summer 2018

Seventeen graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2017-18. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.

• Hankin, Michael (Bartroff), Statistician, Google
• Sun, Rentao (Ma), Data scientist, The Data Incubator
• Bhattacharjee, Chinmoy (Goldstein), Postdoc, IMSV, University of Bern
• Camliyurt, Guher (Kukavica), Member, Institute for Advanced Study (1 yr), Dickson Inst, U of Chicago (3 yrs)
• Donner, Matthew (Guralnick), Hedging intern, Allianz Life
• Egilmez, Ilknur (Lauda)
• Kantarci, Ezgi (Assaf), Postdoc, Sabanci Univeristy
• Kim, Gene B (Fulman), Lecturer, USC
• Kim, Hyun-Jung (Lototsky), Postdoc, Illinois Inst of Technology
• Martone, Giuseppe (Bonahon), Post doc Asst Prof, U of Michigan
• Noh, Eunjung (Ma), Hills Asst Prof (NTT), Rutgers Univ
• Oguz, Can Ozan (Lauda), Postdoc, Galatasaray University
• Ozel, Enes (Fulman), Adjunct Asst Prof, UCLA
• Sirlanci, Melike (Rosen), Postdoc, Comput & Math Sci, Caltech (2 yrs)
• Tian, Bin (Bonahon/Honda), Research Scientist, Pactera
• Wang, Jian (Lototsky), Assistant Vice President, Risk Management, Citi Bank
• Wintner, Moses (Rosen), Data Scientist, Kaiser Permanente Health Innovation Studio

Congratulations to all of them!

This honor was rewarded to Prof. Neelesh Tiruviluamala on May 3, 2018 at the USC University Club.

Click here for quote from a student.

• The Dennis Ray Estes Graduate Teaching Prize to Enes Ozel

• The Theodore Edward Harris Graduate Teaching Prize to Fanhui Xu

• The Dennis Ray Estes Graduate Research Prize to Hyun-Jung Kim

• The Edward and Dolores Blum Graduate Research Prize to Melike Sirlanci

• The Theodore Edward Harris Graduate Research Prize to Emre Demirkaya

Click here for more photos.

• Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Senior Award to Sabrina Enriquez

• Award for Outreach in Mathematics to Seh-Kai Liao

• Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Junior Award to Zhen Liang

Click here for more photos.

The CAMS Prize for Excellence in Research with a substantial Mathematical Component was awarded to Ehsan Emamjomeh-Zadeh and Guher Camliyurt

Click here for more photos.

Professors Jay Bartroff, Larry Goldstein, and Stanislav Minsker, along with Gesine Reinert (Oxford University), have been awarded a grant from the American Institute of Mathematics to fund their workshop, “Stein’s method and applications in high-dimensional statistics“, August 6 to August 10, 2018 at the AIM in San Jose, California.

Igor has been honored for his many contributions to nonlinear partial differential equations, as well as his mentoring of PhD students and his general service to the mathematical profession.

The 2018 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra has been awarded to Robert Guralnick of USC by the American Mathematics Society for outstanding contributions to algebra. This prestigious prize is one the major prizes awarded by the AMS and is given once every three years.
The AMS citation states that this prize was awarded to Guralnick for his groundbreaking research on representation theory, cohomology and subgroup structure of finite quasi-simple groups and the wide-ranging applications of this work to other areas of mathematics.

For more information click here.

Susan welcomes the participants and opens the 2017 Mathematical Congress of the Americas in Montreal.

Professor Susan Montgomery has been appointed to a Gabilan Distinguished Professorship. This professorship is awarded by WiSE to recognize academic excellence as well as contributions to the WiSE community. The WiSE citation says “Susan Montgomery is a distinguished mathematician whose current research interests concern noncommutative algebras: in particular, Hopf algebras, their structure and representations, and their actions on other algebras.

Tiruviluamala, an assistant professor of mathematics at USC Dornsife, is one of the faculty members who will help shape student life as soon as students move in at the eight new residential colleges of the USC Village, which will open in August.

Professors Jay Bartroff, Larry Goldstein, and Stanislav Minsker will host The French-American Collaborative Colloquium on Concentration Inequalities, High Dimensional Statistics, and Stein’s Method in July 2017. The colloquium is funded by the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation and takes place in the Château de la Bretesche, a 14th century French castle in the Loire-Atlantique. Félicitations, messieurs!

Two USC teams took home awards from Datafest 2017 at Chapman University.  The teams, sponsored by the Math Department and Prof. Jay Bartroff, competed against 65 students in 15 teams from 6 universities, including UCLA, UCSF, and UC Irvine.  Of only four awards given, two were to Trojan teams for “best use of statistical models.”  The winning teams were made up of Cheng Cheng, Chelsea Lee, Hsuanpei Lee, Omar Lopez, Hossein Shaffi, Yi Yang Tan, Bingquan Wu, Grace Xu, and Xuejia Xu.  Fight on!

The most recent issue of USC Dornsife News has two very nice profiles of USC math students: graduate student Bahar Acu (PhD 2017) and undergraduate Sabrina Enriquez’18.

• The Dennis Ray Estes Graduate Teaching Prize to Ilknur Egilmez 
• The Theodore Edward Harris Graduate Teaching Prize to Melike Sirlanci 
• The Dennis Ray Estes Graduate Research Prize to Ozlem Ejder
• The Edward and Dolores Blum Graduate Research Prize to Guher Camliyurt 
• The Theodore Edward Harris Graduate Research Prize to Guiseppe Martone

Click here for more photos.

• Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Senior Award to Erin Mills
• Award for Outreach in Mathematics to Emily Mathur
• Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Junior Award to Alec Sahakian

Click here for more photos.

On April 8-9, the Association for Women in Mathematics organized at UCLA a workshop with strong participation from USC graduate students and faculty.
On the left, Melike Sirlanci, Fanhui Xu, Zhanerke Temirgaliyeva, Hyun-Jung Kim, alumna Alona Kryshchenko (PhD 2013) and Professor Sami Assaf (left) eagerly discuss Fanhui’s poster presentation (which also won the Best Poster Award).

Congratulations to Bradley Rava and George Yuning Wang on receiving National Science Foundation research fellowships.

While at USC, Bradley did undergraduate research with Prof. Crombecque on Topology and presented his work at the Young Mathematicians Conference at Ohio State University. Bradley was a board member of the USC Math Club and the USC Stats Club. After pursuing a post baccalaureate program at Yale University, Bradley is about to start a Ph.D. in Statistics at USC.

While at USC, George worked on enumerative problems in combinatorics with Prof. Assaf, resulting in a paper “Enumerating quasi-Yamanouchi tableaux of durfee size two”. George has another publication from an REU program, and is now a graduate student of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania where he is working on exciting problems in algebraic combinatorics.

The NSF Graduate fellowship acknowledges Bradley’s and George’s mathematical growth.

Eight graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2016-17. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.

• Lamberto-Egan, Laffite (Lauda), Teacher, Harvard Westlake College Prep, 8/16
• Xing, Xiaojing (Ma), Quant Associate, Wells Fargo Bank, N. Carolina
• Acu, Bahar (Bonahon), Boas Asst Prof (NTT) of Math, Northwestern
• Ejder, Ozlem (Kamienny), Post-doc, Colorado State University
• Gerhardt, Spencer (Guralnick), Post-doc, Colorado State University
• Nguyen, Dinh, Trung (Fulman), Polytechnic high school Pasadena
• Wang, Fei (Kukavica), Brin Postdoctoral fellowship, Univ of Maryland
• Wu, Cong (Zhang), Quantitative Associate, Wells fargo Bank, San Francisco

Congratulations to all of them!

On April 12, graduate students and faculty from the Department of Mathematics took over the central part of Trousdale Parkway for the third annual Mathematics Festival. This very successful celebration of mathematics was held in conjunction with Math Awareness Month, and attracted many visitors. Here is the full article from USC Dornsife News, with many pictures.

Date: May 22, 2017 – May 26, 2017

Organizer: Juhi Jang

For more information click here.

The USC Mentoring Awards honor individual faculty members for helping to build a supportive academic environment through faculty-to-student mentoring and faculty-to-faculty mentoring. Prof. Sami Assaf was one of three faculty honored for “Faculty Mentoring Undergraduates” this year.

Prof. Cymra Haskell has been promoted to Professor (teaching) in recognition of his many contributions to the department’s teaching mission.

Prof. Guillermo Reyes-Souto has been promoted to Assistant Professor (teaching) in recognition of his many contributions to the department’s teaching mission.

Congratulations to Nicolle Sandoval-Gonzalez on being selected to receive a 2017 WiSE Leadership Award for Students and Postdoctoral Scholars

Fanhui Xu, a student of Prof. Remigijus Mikulevicius, was awarded the top prize for best poster (out of 32 entrants) at the AWM research Symposium. Her topic was “The rate of convergence of strong Euler approximation for Levy-driven SDE’s”

Professor gave Distinguished Lecture Series at the Center for Mathematical Sciences at the Technion (in Haifa, Israel).

On November 23, 2016 Robert Guralnick of mathematics is elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

On November 17, 2016 Eric participates in a panel addressing the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in his role as member of the Board of TPSE discussing what the private sector is doing in STEM Education.

Eight graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2015-16. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the place of employment.

• Michael Abram (Lauda), Exec VP, Integral Investment Advisors, Inc., Lecturer, California State University Stanislaus.
• Yongjian Kang (Lv,Zhang), Quant Analyst, Google.
• Chandrasekhar Karnam (Ma,Zhang), Quant Associate, Morgan Stanley NYC.
• Panagiotis Tsilifis (Mikulevicius), Postdoc/Research Associate, USC, Department of Civil Engineering
• Henry Tucker (Montgomery), Postdoc, UC San Diego.
• Kerem Ugurlu (Ziane), Postdoc, University of Washington.
• Andrew Williams (Honda), Teacher, La Canada-Flintridge College Prep.
• Weisheng Xie (Ma), postdoc, Quant PHD Associate, Wells Fargo Security.

Congratulations to all of them!

Math Major Sabrina Enriquez ’19 was recently featured in the Fall 2016 issue of USC Dornsife Magazine. Here is a picture of Sabrina presenting the results of her research at the 2016 SACNAS Conference in Long Beach, CA, with a quote from the article. The whole article can be found on Page 18 of the Fall 2016 issue of USC Dornsife Magazine.I just always really, really liked math. When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher told me I was good at it. So, I just stuck with it after that. I thought ‘Wow, this is so much fun.

A Workshop organised by Peter Constantin, Natasa Pavlovic and Vlad Vicol on current developments in fluid dynamics will be held at ICERM at Brown on the occasion of Susan Friedlander’s birthday.

With great sadness and regret, we feel the departure of our friend and colleague Sol Golomb. Sol was a kind, gentle person, bursting with enthusiasm for mathematics. He was one of the first brilliant mathematicians who recognized the importance of core mathematics for modern communications. Much of Sol’s work (recognized by a National Medal of Science and many other awards) was directed at applications. That said, he delighted in puzzles and his first love was number theory. We miss you, Sol.

On July 19, 2016, Jin Ma is giving a plenary speech at the 9th World Congress of the Bachelier Finance Society, held in New York City.

• Harris teaching prize to Fei Wang
• Ester teaching prize to Kira Sushkoff-Nguyen
• Harris research prize to Henry Tucker
• Estes research prize to Spencer Gerhardt
• Blum research prize to Bahar Acu

Click here for more photos

• Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Senior Award to George Wang
• Award for Outreach in Mathematics to Bradley Rava
• Al and Teresa Zobrist Excellence in Mathematics Junior Award to Erin Mills

Click here for more photos

The CAMS Prize for Excellence in Research with a substantial Mathematical Component to Fei Wang and Jie Ren. Click here for more photos

On May 24, 2016, Eric Friedlander is giving the opening remarks at the Goethe Institute exhibit of “Math You Can touch”.

On July 7, 2016, Eric is giving the 5th annual Emil Artin Vorlesung at the University of Heidelberg.

CAMS Board Member Solomon  Golomb is awarded the 2016 Franklin Medal for his work in digital communications.

CAMS member Juhi Jang is awarded a prestigious Von Neuman Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is a visiting member at IAS for the academic year 2015-2016.

Prof. Neelesh Tiruviluamala has been promoted to Assistant Professor (teaching) in recognition of his many contributions to the department’s teaching mission.

On occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Francis Bonahon was honored by an international conference “Classical and quantum hyperbolic geometry and topology”, which took place on July 6-10, 2015 in Orsay, France. The conference was cofunded by the Office for Science and Technology of the Embassy of France in the US.

Bradley Rava and Cameron Thieme will be presenting their research work at the Young Mathematicians Conference held at the Ohio State University on August 21-24. Bradley worked on P-colorability by pairs as a knot invariants, and Cameron’s research was devoted to Bounds for self-intersection of closed curves in the 2-puncture plane. Both research projects were supervised by David Crombecque.

Nine students received their PhD from our department in 2014, and are all headed for good jobs in academia and industry. These are:

• Diogo Bessam, going to the Catholic Pontifical University (PUC) of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;
• Ibrahim Ekren, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland;
• Umit Islak, University of Minnesota;
• Yuan Pei, Ursinus College;
• Grigory Sokolov, Binghamton University;
• Yin Tian, Simons  Center for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook, NY;
• Joseph Timmer, Louisiana State University;
• Jia Zhuo, Morgan Stanley.

Dr. Michael Waterman has been awarded the Dan David Prize for his seminal and influential contributions to biological sequence analysis. His algorithms are the basis of computational biology.

Dr. Aaron Lauda received a 2015 Simons Foundation fellowship, allowing him to take a full year of academic leave to pursue his theoretical mathematics research.

Dr. Susan Friedlander has been elected Chair of the Executive Committee of the Mathematical Council of the Americas.

The first CAMS Prize winner has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. Vlad Vicol, who received his PhD in 2010 from USC, is currently an Assistant Professor at Princeton University.

Dr. Aravind Asok has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Aravind is an internationally recognized leader in A^1 homotopy theory.

Dr. David Crombecque has been promoted to Assistant Professor (teaching) in recognition of his many contributions to the department’s teaching mission.

Dr. Eric Friedlander has been elected Chair-Elect of the Mathematics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.