Prizes and Awards

1. Professor Emeritus Frank Olver has been selected by the US Secretary of Commerce to receive the Gold Medal of the Commerce Department, for his work on the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This is the highest award that the Department can bestow. Congratulations!
2. Our Mailroom Supervisor Fletcher Kinne was selected by President Loh to receive the President's Distinguished Service Award at the 28th Annual Faculty and Staff Convocation on Tuesday, October 4, 2011, for "exceptional performance, leadership, and service by a member of the University staff". Congratulations to Fletch on the well-deserved honor!
3. Congratulations to Professor Larry Washington, who was selected as a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher for 2011-2012. He gave a public lecture on the subject "Cannonballs, donuts, and secrets: from idle questions to cryptographic applications" on Thursday, Nov. 17.
4. Assistant Professor Maria Cameron is the winner of a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship for 2011. Congratulations!
5. Professor Ricardo Nochetto was selected as a SIAM Fellow for 2011, in recognition of his contributions to the study of free boundary problems and phase transitions.
6. There are now "Maryland hubs" for two new $5M Research Networks in Mathematical Sciences, funded by NSF. Professor Eitan Tadmor is directing the main hub of the "KI-Net" in "Kinetic description of emerging challenges in multiscale problems of natural sciences". Professors William Goldman and Richard Wentworth are among the PIs directing a hub of the Network in "Geometric Structures and Representation Varieties".
7. Martha Hopkins from the Mathematics Undergraduate Office was honored with the CMNS Outstanding Non-Exempt Employee Award at the annual College Spring Academic Festival on Friday, April 20
8. For Spring 2012 Graduate Student Awards, see this article in the Graduate Section of the website.
9. Congratulations to our Spring 2012 graduate degree recipients, including:
   • MATH Ph.D.s: David Aulicino, Xuwen Chen, Jeffrey Frazier, Yu-Ru Huang, David Karpuk, Alexey Miroshnikov, Sean Rostami, Rodrigo Trevino, and Joseph Yeager.
   • MATH M.A.s: Travis Andrews, Bryant Angelos, Ran Cui, Richard Hutchinson, Paul Koprowski, and Richard Rast
   • STAT M.A.s: Brett Williams and Xuan Yao
   • AMSC Ph.D.s: Sean Barnes, Amanda Galante, Guoyuan Liu, Christopher Miller, Alfredo Nava-Tudela, and Shelby Wilson
   • AMSC M.S.s: Patrick Carlos, Zi Ding, Timothy Doster, Tyler Drombosky, Virginia Forstall, Kevin Hencke, Chiao-Wen (Joyce) Hsiao, Xuan Liu, Yongjun Luo, Lee Mendelowitz, Catherine Ochalek, Enrique Otarola, Joseph Paulson, Christoforos Somarakis, Ignacio Tomas, and Hana Ueda.

 Personnel Changes

1. Welcome to our new faculty members joining us effective Fall 2011: Assistant Professors Amin Gholampour and Christian Zickert, and Professors Patrick Brosnan, Pierre-Emmanuel Jabin, and Jian-Jian Ren. Gholampour's research interests include Gromov-Witten and Donaldson-Thomas invariants. Zickert works on geometry/topology and algebraic K-theory. Brosnan's research is in Hodge theory and algebraic geometry. Jabin's research is in partial differential equations and kinetic theory. Ren's work is in mathematical statistics, especially the analysis of censored data.
2. Three faculty members are retiring at the end of the 2011-2012 academic year: Professors David Kueker, Robert Warner, and Peter Wolfe. A reception was held in their honor on Friday, May 11, 2012.
3. Yuan Liao, currently at Princeton University, has been hired as a new Assistant Professor starting in 2012. He works on problems of high-dimensional modeling and Bayesian statistics.
4. Yanir Rubinstein, currently at Stanford University, has been hired as a new tenured Associate Professor starting in 2012. Yanir works on geometric analysis and the geometry of Kähler manifolds.
5. Congratulations to Sandra Cerrai, Leonid Koralov, and Dio Margetis, who have been promoted to the rank of Professor effective July 2012.

Obituaries 

1. Professor Emeritus R. Bruce Kellogg passed away April 30, 2012, after a brief illness, at the age of 81. An obituary may be seen here or here. Professor Kellogg worked on partial differential equations and numerical methods, and was very active mathematically up to the time of his death. His publication list includes about 100 research papers.  After his retirement from Maryland in 1999, he moved to Landrum, South Carolina, where he served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of South Carolina.
2. Ruth Davis Lohr, the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Maryland, passed away on March 28, 2012 at the age of 83. She served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Advanced Technology and as Assistant Secretary of Energy. Eventually she set up her own consulting company, The Pymatuning Group, Inc., of which she was CEO. An obituary may be found here.  Ruth Davis was a generous benefactor of the university, and she endowed the Ruth Davis Professorship, currently held by Jonathan Rosenberg. The Ruth Davis Graduate Fellowship, which is given alternately in Mathematics and Physics, was established in her honor by The Aerospace Corporation, on whose Board she served. A feature story on Ruth Davis appeared in Terp magazine in 2004.
3. We regret to announce the passing of Professor E. G. K. (Ken) Lopez-Escobar on September 1, 2011. Professor Lopez-Escobar worked in several areas of logic, including model theory and proof theory, and was especially interested in intuitionistic proof systems. He also had a deep interest in the history of mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 at the University of California, Berkeley, and came to Maryland in 1966 after a Moore instructorship at MIT.
4. We regret to report that math department alumnus Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work based in part on his 1954 Ph.D. thesis in mathematics at UMCP, has died on October 23, 2011, at the age of 94. His thesis advisor was Professor Richard Good. You can read an obituary here. In his memory, the departmental colloquium room has been renamed Herbert Hauptman Hall.
5. Earnest Harrison, who came to the math department as a lecturer after a very successful career as an engineer with Northrop Grumman, passed away on June 4, 2012. An obituary has appeared in the Gazette newspaper.