Karin Melnick of the University of Maryland, College Park, has been awarded the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars for the 2020–2021 academic year.

Melnick’s research is on differential-geometric aspects of rigidity. This work comprises global and local results relating the automorphisms of a differential-geometric structure with the geometric and topological properties of the space. Melnick also works in smooth dynamics, in which an invariant differential-geometric structure plays an important role in the proof of rigidity theorems. Melnick is a leader in research on the Lorentzian Lichnerowicz conjecture, a statement about conformal transformations of compact Lorentzian manifolds. Together with collaborators, she has developed new techniques in the setting of Cartan connections that have facilitated progress on this problem, as well as many results for other differential-geometric structures and general parabolic Cartan geometries.

Brief Biography of Karin Melnick:

Melnick received her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2006 under the direction of Benson Farb. With an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, she went to Yale University as a Gibbs Assistant Professor. She received a Junior Research Fellowship from the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in the spring of 2009 and that fall began at the University of Maryland, where she is now an associate professor. Previously, Melnick has been awarded an AMS Centennial Fellowship and an NSF CAREER grant. She divides her time between the U.S. and Germany with her partner and their young child, and is very grateful for the flexibility provided by the Birman Fellowship and the opportunities it provides to advance her research and career goals.  

About the Fellowship:

Established in 2017, the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars seeks to give exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion for the Birman Fellowship, which carries a stipend of US$50,000, is the excellence of the candidate’s research. Read an interview with Joan Birman about her decision to create the Fellowship with the goal of "helping more women mathematicians to develop their creative voices." See more information about the Fellowship.

Congratulations to Vadim Kaloshin for receiving an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced grant. The title of his project is “Spectral Rigidity and Integrability for Billiards and Geodesic Flows”.

The ERC Advanced grants are among the most prestigious grants awarded by the European union. These grants are highly competitive with a success rate of under 10%.  The number of grants awarded in Mathematics this year was 9.

Over the last decade, UMD’s nominations yielded 33 scholarships—the most in the nation

By: Abby Robinson

For the third year in a row, the University of Maryland’s four undergraduate nominees have been awarded scholarships by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, which encourages students to pursue advanced study and research careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. 

UMD’s 2020 Goldwater Scholars are:

• Jesse Matthews, a junior chemical engineering and mathematics dual-degree student who is also a member of the University Honors program in the Honors College
• Scott Moroch, a junior majoring in physics
• Seungtaek Daniel Oh, a junior majoring in biological sciences with a specialization in cell biology and genetics who is also a member of the Integrated Life Sciences program in the Honors College
• Pavan Ravindra, a junior biochemistry and computer science dual-degree student who is also a member of the Integrated Life Sciences program in the Honors College

  Read more: Four Terps Named 2020 Goldwater Scholars

Three faculty members in the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) received 2020 Simons Foundation Fellowships. The prestigious fellowships provide support for faculty scientists to extend a one-term, university-sponsored sabbatical into a full year, allowing them to focus solely on advancing fundamental research in mathematics or theoretical physics. UMD researchers received 2 of the 40 fellowships awarded for mathematics and 1 of the eight fellows for theoretical physics.

The rest of the article can be read following the link: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/4557

In 2019 a total of 4,299 students from 488 institutions from all over the US and Canada participated in the 80th Putnam competition. The University of Maryland Putnam team was ranked 14th out of 488 participating schools. The team consisted of Erik Metz, Steppan Konoplev and Pratik Rathore. Every year in the past four years, the University of Maryland Putnam team has ranked in the top 15.

Erik Metz, who ranked 51st, received an Honorable Mention award. Steppan Konoplev ranked in the top 200; Pratik Rathore and Justin Hontz ranked in the top 250.

Congratulations to our team and the participants.

Complete results can be found here.