2025 Simons Fellow in Mathematics

The Department of Mathematics is delighted to announce that Professor Cristian D.
Popescu was awarded one of the 2025 Simons Fellowships in Mathematics by the
Simons Foundation.

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-fellows-in-mathematics/?tab=awardees

Professor Popescu will use this award to spend the 2025-2026 academic year as a
Visiting Fellow at Princeton University and as a Member of the School Mathematics at
the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. While in Princeton, Professor Popescu will
investigate new approaches to the theory of special values of motivic L-functions, a
central area of research within number theory and arithmetic geometry.

This is Professor Popescu’s second Simons Fellowship, following a 2015-2016 award
spent as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University.

The Simons Foundation, established in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons, advances the
frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences through grant funding,
support for research and public engagement (https://www.simonsfoundation.org).

Congratulations to incoming faculty member Federico Pasqualotto on receiving the Stefan Bergman Fellowship from the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Federico's research interests center on the partial differential equations of mathematical physics that arise in several physical theories: fluid mechanics, nonlinear wave equations, mathematical general relativity and dispersive equations.

Learn more about the fellowship on the AMS website.

Professor Jeffrey Rabin has been selected as an outstanding mentor in the Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars Program 2024.  The SGTS program has helped hundreds of graduate students prepare for and teach summer courses for undergraduates. This program offers advanced graduate students a valuable opportunity to gain faculty-mentored teaching experience while expanding Summer Session course offerings for undergraduates.  Professor Rabin was commended for both the quality and quantity of student support, and for playing a significant role in his mentee's growth and development as an instructor.

Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Computer Science & Engineering, Fan Chung Graham is one of five recipients of the 2024 Revelle Medal.  Created to honor Roger Revelle and first awarded in 1981, the Revelle Medal honors a record of accomplishment that advances UC San Diego in fulfillment of the campus mission of exceptional teaching, research, service, and is the highest honor given by the chancellor to an emeriti faculty member. 

The inaugural Paul Erdos Chair of Combinatorics, Professor Chung Graham is a researcher in Combinatorics and Graph Theory.  She is the author of more than 240 papers, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematics Society among others.  Professor Chung Graham received the Euler Medal in 2017 and the Allendoerfer Award in 1990 and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorics.

A video honoring Professor Chung Graham can be found here.

Congratulations to Freddie Manners on receiving the prestigious European Congress of Mathematics (EMS) Prize for "his remarkable contributions to additive combinatorics and related areas, in particular to the foundations of higher-order Fourier analysis, as well as for miscellaneous other results such as the solution of the pyjama problem."

You can read more about the prizes on the EMS website.

Congratulations to Professors Bennett Chow and Cristian Popescu, and Visiting Scholar Andreas Wieser on becoming members of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) for 2024-25.  This prestigious fellowship recognizes the significance of these scholars' work, and it is an opportunity to advance their research and exchange ideas with scholars from around the world.

Among the recipients of the inaugural School of Physical Sciences Staff Awards were three staff from Mathematics:  

Kyung Brown - received the Outstanding Leadership award (for staff that performed above and beyond what was expected while navigating their team through a complex project)

Cassidy Harris and Milagro Mariona-Cruz - were separately honored as Best Team Contributor (for working collaboratively to accomplish key departmental goals/objectives; working with others to achieve cost savings or process improvements)

Please join us in celebrating the accomplishment of Kyung, Cassidy and Milagro!

Congratulations to Fan Chung, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Paul Erdos Professor in Combinatorics, on her election to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).  Professor Chung Graham joins a body of 2,617 active scientists who were elected by their peers to membership in the NAS for outstanding contributions to research. The NAS, established by an Act of Congress signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community

Professors Peter Ebenfelt and Natalia Komarova are among 502 scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest general scientific organizations.

Peter Ebenfelt is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics. He has served as chair of the Department of Mathematics and as associate dean for research in the School of Physical Sciences. He is currently the school’s associate dean for faculty advancement and success. Ebenfelt’s research is in complex analysis, complex geometry and partial differential equations.

Natalia Komarova joined UC San Diego as professor of mathematics and a Dean’s Scholar in 2024. Komarova’s research interests lie at the interface between mathematical and life sciences. She believes that fascinating natural phenomena can be translated into interesting mathematical problems. Evolutionary dynamics is a theme that unites the different areas of application, which include cancer modeling, virus dynamics and language evolution. 

Congratulations to Tianyi Zheng for being awarded the prestigious 2024 Rollo Davidson Prize for her profound contributions and resolution of long-standing conjectures regarding random walks on groups.  

The Rollo Davidson Prize, established in memory of Rollo Davidson (1944-1970), has been annually recognizing young probabilists since 1976. The prize is awarded on the basis of nominations generated by the Rollo Davidson Trustees.  The Trust was founded in 1975 in memory of Rollo Davidson, an accomplished mathematician of remarkable potential, and Fellow-elect of Churchill College, Cambridge, who died on the Piz Bernina in 1970.  Initial funding from the Trust came from the royalties of two collections of papers published in 1973/74 by friends and colleagues of Rollo, and it has benefited from the continuing association with the Davidson family.