Department alumnus Simon Levin, George M. Moffett Professor of Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, has been awarded the National Medal of Science for his research in ecological complexity.  He received his Ph.D. from Maryland in 1964 under the direction of Monroe Martin.  An article about him appears in the latest issue of SIAM News. Not that long ago, Levin also received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

We regret to announce the passing of Associate Professor Horst Elmar Winkelnkemper on April 10, 2016.  Elmar received his PhD at Princeton in 1971, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study before coming to Maryland in 1973.  During his career he visited IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette, France and the Instituto de Matematicas, UNAM, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and gave an Arbeitstagung talk in Bonn, Germany.  One of his earliest results, which attracted a lot of attention, showed that a simply connected closed manifold in sufficiently high dimension has a decomposition as an "open book" if and only if its signature vanishes. Winkelnkemper's most cited publications are a short proof, joint with Fields Medalist Bill Thurston, that every closed 3-manifold admits a contact structure, and "The graph of a foliation", eventually used by another Fields Medalist, Alain Connes, in defining the C*-algebra of a foliation.  There is a nice mathematical appreciation of Elmar's work by none other than Dennis Sullivan in the AMS Notices, Augest 2016 issue, page 829.

Assistant Professors Maria Cameron and Jacob Bedrossian have been awarded prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from NSF.  CAREER awards are intended to provide stable 5-year funding for early career scientists with:

Bedrossian's project, Award #1552826, concerns fluid flow at high Reynolds number.  Cameron's project, Award #1554907, concerns computational tools for large stochastic networks.

Undergraduate math major Katherine Cordwell is one of the winners of a 2016 Goldwater Scholarship.  The Goldwater Scolarships were established by Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry Goldwater.  They are intended to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue research careers in these fields.

Graduate student Kayla Davie of AMSC has been awarded a prestigious and highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her project "On a mechanical model for tumor growth: Modeling, Analysis and Simulations" supervised by Professor Konstantina Trivisa.

Congratulations to Professors Tom Haines and Vadim Kaloshin, who have been awarded 2016 Simons Fellowships to support sabbatical projects in the coming year.

The Board of Regents has approved naming the Mathematics Building for Professor Emeritus William E. "Brit" Kirwan, who served as chair of the Mathematics Department before moving on to many administrative posts, such as Provost, then President, then President of Ohio State, and eventually Chancellor of the University System of Maryland.  He currently serves as special advisor to the Chancellor.  A naming ceremony for the building is scheduled for October 29, 2015 at 2:00PM.