University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Mathematics Lei Chen received a 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This two-year, $75,000 fellowship is awarded annually to early-career researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. 

“We are very proud to see three of our faculty members recognized in the same year,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS). “Lei [Chen], Alicia [Kollár] and Pratyush [Tiwary] have very bright futures ahead of them and we appreciate the Sloan Foundation recognizing their potential and supporting them now during their early careers.”

Chen, who arrived at UMD in 2021, will use the fellowship to further her research on problems that connect group theory, geometric topology and dynamics.

The field of topology generally aims to classify different kinds of geometric objects called manifolds. For example, mathematicians see a ball and a cube as the same manifolds because they can be continuously reshaped to each other, but a ball and a donut are two different manifolds because they cannot. Chen focuses her research on the symmetry of manifolds. She and her collaborators have successfully classified all the relationships between the total symmetry of all manifolds.

“I am very excited and honored to receive this award and funding,” Chen said. “I will use this funding to travel and invite people to UMD to expand my research. Also, big thanks to UMD and all my letter writers for supporting me and sharing their mathematical world with me!”

This semester, Chen is working at Brown University’s Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics as a semester participant for a special program on “braids.” Chen joined UMD following a postdoc position as Noether Instructor at Caltech. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 2018 and her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from China’s Peking University in 2013.

Awarded this year to 118 of the brightest young scientists across the U.S. and Canada, the Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s science faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising junior researchers to its ranks. 

“Today's Sloan Research Fellows represent the scientific leaders of tomorrow,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “As formidable young scholars, they are already shaping the research agenda within their respective fields—and their trailblazing won't end here.”

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 68 faculty members from UMD have received a Sloan Research Fellowship. A dozen CMNS faculty members have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships since 2015.

The students’ research interests range from algebraic geometry to number theory and applied mathematics.

Eleven graduate students in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland received 2021-22 Herbert A. Hauptman Endowed Graduate Fellowships. 

The fellowship program was created with an estate gift from Carol Fullerton that honors the memory of her late father, Nobel laureate Herbert A. Hauptman (Ph.D. ’55, mathematics), and launched in 2020 thanks to a gift from Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics James A. Yorke (Ph.D. ’66, mathematics). 

The 2021-22 Hauptman Fellows are:

• Priyankur Chaudhuri, algebraic geometry
• Yunjiang Ge, bioinformatics/biostatistics
• Jackson Hopper, representation theory
• Elliott Lehrer, algebraic number theory
• Qihang Li, number theory
• Michael Rawson, harmonic and signal processing
• Arpith Shanbhag, algebraic geometry
• Stephen Sorokanich, applied mathematics
• Tessa Thorsen, applied mathematics
• Gustavo Varela-Alvarenga, statistics
• Xuze Zhang, semiparametric statistics and time series analysis

UMD’s 35 scholarships in the past decade rank second in the nation.

George Li, a sophomore computer science and mathematics double-degree student at the University of Maryland, has been awarded a 2022 scholarship 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. 

Li is among 417 Goldwater Scholars, three from UMD, selected from 1,242 nominees nationally. Goldwater Scholars receive one- or two-year scholarships that cover the cost of tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 per year.

Over the last decade, UMD’s nominations yielded 35 scholarships—the second-most in the nation behind Stanford University. The Goldwater Foundation has honored 76 UMD winners and five honorable mentions since the program’s first award was given in 1989.

“Our Goldwater Scholars are conducting research on the leading edge of their disciplines—engineering new clean energy solutions, using algorithms to optimize the distribution of limited resources in contact tracing or access to vaccines, and designing new gene-based diagnostics and therapies against aggressive cancers. Each of them is on a trajectory to make major research contributions that have societal impact,” said Robert Infantino, associate dean of undergraduate education in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Infantino has led UMD’s Goldwater Scholarship nominating process since 2001.

Li arrived at UMD in fall 2020—when most classes were still being taught online due to the pandemic—but that didn’t stop him from jumping into research his first semester. In fact, the pandemic offered him unique research opportunities. Working with Aravind Srinivasan, Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at UMD, and collaborators at the University of Virginia, Li developed an algorithm for efficient contact tracing that has been recommended for implementation to the Virginia Department of Health. Li also developed an approximation algorithm to determine where to deploy vaccine distribution sites to improve accessibility to vaccines. 

“George is the first author on two papers accepted in a well-known artificial intelligence conference, AAMAS 2022, on contact tracing and mobile vaccination for diseases like COVID-19,” Srinivasan said. “He came up with new mathematical and algorithmic ideas and very fast software development for these submissions. He has a strong career ahead combining math, computer science and data science."

Li also worked with UMD Assistant Professor of Computer Science Furong Huang on using a powerful algebraic tool called tensor decompositions to develop learning algorithms that make non-discriminatory decisions. This project fueled Li’s interest in deriving practical implications from theoretical models. 

In addition to earning an International Collegiate Programming Contest Regionals Bronze Medal, Li is a member of UMD’s table tennis club and a teaching assistant for CMSC 451: Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. While at UMD, Li was awarded a President’s Scholarship, Michael Antonov Endowed Scholarship and Edgar Krahn Scholarship.

After graduation, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, with a focus on theoretical computer science in the areas of learning theory, algorithms and combinatorial optimization, and differential privacy.