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.

March 16-19, 2016
Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland
College Park, MD

The Seminar on Stochastic Processes 2016 will be held on March 16-19, 2016 (Wednesday through Saturday) at the University of Maryland, in College Park. Apart from informal presentations by conference participants, there will be plenary talks by the following five invited speakers:

• Claudio Landim (Kai Lai Chung Lecturer), IMPA (Instituto Nacional de Matemàtica Pura e Aplicada), Rio de Janeiro,
• Louigi Addario-Berry, McGill University, Montreal.
• Yuri Bakhtin, Courant Institute, New York.
• Yimin Xiao, Michigan State University, East Lansing.
• Thaleia Zariphopoulou, University of Texas at Austin. Austin.

This conference will feature the sixth annual Kai Lai Chung Lecture honoring Kai Lai Chung's Mathematical career. Kai Lai Chung was one of the leading probabilists of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the founders of the Seminar on Stochastic Processes.

The main conference will be held on March 17-19, 2016.

On March 16 there will be a special set of tutorial lectures and discussions targeted at new researchers. These new research lectures will be given by Konstantin Khanin, University of Toronto.

The conference program can be found here.

For general information about this seminar series, please visit the main homepage for the Seminar on Stochastic Processes.

Participants are encouraged to give a short talk or present an open problem. Complete request on the registration form.

Sponsored by the Department of Mathematics of the University of Maryland and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Women in Probability will be hosting a dinner during the 2016 Seminar on Stochastic Processes on Wednesday, March 16 at 6:30p. This is an organization for women active in probability research. Their primary purpose is to provide networking and mentoring opportunities for early career women. Their activities are funded by the NSF. For more information on Women in Probability and its activities, please visit their website

http://womeninprobability.orghttp://womeninprobability.org

We can offset dinner costs for women graduate student and postdoc attendees. Anyone interested in participating in the dinner should please email Tai Melcher (melcher@virginia.edu ).