The Mathematics Department has named Poornima B, Jiyoung Choi, and Jiajia Wang as recipients of the inaugural Emily Zhu Memorial Award in Mathematics.  This award, endowed in honor of Mathematics student Emily Zhu who began her PhD in 2019 but died suddenly in the summer of 2023, recognizes outstanding graduate students who have demonstrated a commitment to fostering improved gender equity in mathematics.

The Graduate Awards Committee has selected the following students for the 2025-26 TA Awards:

Jasmine Browne nominated by Frances Hammock
"She was highly responsible and consistently went above and beyond to support (students)"

Nick Karris nominated by Robert Webber
"Nick was well-prepared and even worked to tie the material in the class to his own research, which was a nice touch."

Lillian McPherson nominated by Leesa Anzaldo
"She has been a consistently reliable and hardworking TA who cares about student learning."

Sawyer Robertson nominated by Jason Schweinsberg
"He was always very engaged, and it was clear that he thinks carefully about his teaching."

Jiajia Wang  nominated by Jiewang Nie and Ioana Dumitriu
"She is incredibly dependable and reliable, always very professional, and goes above and beyond the call of duty."

Professor Daniel Kane has been awarded the 2026 Gödel Prize along with co-authors Ilias Diakonikolas, Gautam Kamath, Jerry Li, Ankur Moitra and Alistair Stewart.  The prize, named in honor of Kurt Gödel, in recognition of his contributions to mathematical logic, is awarded for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science is sponsored jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGACT). 

As noted by the award committee, the paper, Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability, fundamentally changed (the) understanding of what is algorithmically possible in robust high-dimensional learning.

Professor Adrian Ioana has been recognized by the International Congress of Basic Science as a recipient of the 2026 Frontiers of Science Award for his contribution to Functional Analysis and Operator Theory in his paper 'Wreath-like products of groups and their von Neumann algebras I: W*-superrigidity' from Annals of Mathematics (2023) with Ionut Chifan, Denis Osin and Bin Sun.

Congratulations to Fall 2025 PhD graduate Kehan Long, who has been awarded the Dean's Dissertation Award for his thesis "Certifiable Robot Control under Uncertainty: Towards Safety, Stability, and Robustness."  Kehan's thesis advisors were Professors Melvin Leok (Mathematics), Nikolay Atanasov (ECE) and Jorge Cortés (MAE).  Kehan's research interest lies at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory, with a focus on enabling reliable robot autonomy.  He is currently working on general-purpose robotic learning with SceniX AI. 

Congratulations to Professor Robert Webber on his selection as a 2026-27 Hellman Fellow.  Professor Webber is interested in randomized numerical methods and their applications to data science and scientific computing. Specifically, his work focuses on randomized algorithms and their applications to chemistry, astronomy, and geophysics.

Congratulations to Professor Vishal Patil on his selection as a 2026-27 Hellman Fellow.  Professor Patil's research focuses on problems in applied mathematics, with an emphasis on living systems, soft matter and fluid dynamics. A central theme is exploring the role of geometry, topology and information in these systems.

Well deserved congratulations to Algebraic Number Theorist, Aaron Pollack who has received two recent honors.  Aaron has been named as a 2026 Simons Fellowship in Mathematics and one of 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows.  Aaron's research concerns automorphic forms, their arithmetic properties, and their L-functions. His most recent works develop properties of automorphic forms on exceptional groups.

Congratulations to Alex Cloninger on receiving a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics.  Alex researches problems in the area of geometric data analysis and applied harmonic analysis, with a focus on approaches that model the data as being locally lower dimensional, including data concentrated near manifolds or subspaces.  These types of problems arise in a number of scientific disciplines, including imaging, medicine, and artificial intelligence, and the techniques developed relate to a number of machine learning and statistical algorithms, including deep learning, network analysis, and measuring distances between probability distributions.  His current research plans are to develop new algorithms grounded in geometric methods that are both computationally efficient and theoretically rigorous.

Professor Jiawang Nie was one of 25 members recognized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for their outstanding research and service to the community.  Professor Nie was recognized for contributions to optimization, tensor computation, truncated moment problems, and convex algebraic geometry.