Read more about the members of our community who have been honored recently for their outstanding contributions to the university and the field of mathematics.

Faculty

• Sean Gruber won the CMNS Dean’s outstanding lecturer award.
• Abba Gumel, who was named a Distinguished University Professor.
• Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner, Dima Dolgopyat, Adam Kanigowski, and Tamas Darvas, who won
• the Frontiers of Science Award.
• Uri Bader, Adam Kanigowski, Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner were invited to speak at the 2026
• International Congress of Mathematics (ICM).
• Francisco Arana-Herrera (a postdoc) won the Michael Brin Dynamical Systems Prize for Young Mathematicians.
• Dima Dolgopyat was named a Simons Foundation Fellow.
• Larry Washington won the 2025 Winston Family Award, by the Honors College.
• Larry Washington won the 2025 CMNS Board of Visitors Creative Educator Award.
• Tamás Darvas for being awarded the Purdue Science 2025 Distinguished Science Alumni Award

Students

• Our Putnam team won 7th place (out of over 450 universities). This is the third year in a row that the Maryland team finishes in the top 8.
• 3 Goldwater Scholars: Harikesh Kailad (CS+Math), Luiz Mata Lopez (CS+Math), Benjamin Raufman (Chem+Math)
• Brandon Kolstoe won the CMNS Board of Visitors outstanding graduate student award
• Menting Chao (AMSC), won the CMNS Dean’s outstanding teaching assistant award
• Aditi Sen for winning the Edward C. Bryant Award for an outstanding graduate student in survey statistics

Recent high school graduates can bypass sophomore math requirements by taking exams to earn college math credits at UMD.

In 2019, the University of Maryland created an innovative program that revolutionized how talented high school students transition to college-level mathematics. The credit-by-exam initiative, spearheaded by UMD Department of Mathematics Chair Doron Levy and Professor Lawrence Washington, allows advanced high school students to take final exams for sophomore-level college math courses—and earn UMD credits if they pass.

“The program is really a win-win for both our department and for incoming UMD students,” Levy said. “We’ve attracted a lot of remarkable talent to UMD in the past few years and these advanced students have also been able to smoothly transition into our department as well as into many others such as physics or engineering.”

Unlike traditional Advanced Placement exams, which typically allow students to earn credits for freshman-level math courses like Calculus I and II (at UMD, the equivalents of MATH 140 and MATH 141), UMD’s program addresses a critical gap for students who master material well beyond this level. Many students from STEM magnet schools, international baccalaureate programs and accelerated math tracks take multivariable calculus and linear algebra (both college sophomore-level content) before graduating high school. Yet few universities recognized this advanced achievement for incoming freshmen, which often led to frustration for new college students hoping to save time and money by avoiding repeating material.

The first year, nearly 150 students took the MATH 240: Calculus III exam and 120 passed. A quarter of the passing students then enrolled at UMD, with six math majors in the cohort—a success for the university’s recruitment effort and official recognition of the students’ abilities.  

“One of our major goals is to lighten students’ course loads by making it easier for them to get through their general education or foundational math credits,” Lawrence explained. “With those classes out of the way, students can free up their schedules for electives that really interest them or put them ahead in their major programs with higher-level courses.”

Building a stronger math cohort today and tomorrow

To prepare high school teachers hoping to help students review for the exams, UMD faculty members provided them access to previous unused exams stored in the department’s test bank as study material. The credit-by-exam tests are carefully selected from previous years’ unused alternate tests—the same ones reserved for UMD students who miss their scheduled finals. Like real college exams, the tests are monitored and taken within similar time constraints. This ensures that the high school students earning credit meet the same standards as their college counterparts.

The credit-by-exam program was a game-changer for mathematics major Samuel Lidz, who participated as a Montgomery Blair High School student in 2021. He believes that taking the exam as a high school student made a difference to his academic experience at UMD because it allowed him quicker access to the kind of advanced content that he always wanted to study. 

“I took the Calc III credit by exam and received an A for it, which let me avoid taking any math courses below the 400 level by the time I got to UMD,” Lidz explained. “By my sophomore year here, I was already taking graduate-level courses. I wouldn’t have been able to accelerate so far ahead had I not taken the exam.” The math credit-by-exam program has grown significantly since its launch in 2019 with four schools. In 2024, approximately 600 students from 15 schools took the exams for MATH 240, 241 and 246. 

As of spring 2025, the following schools from Howard and Montgomery Counties are enrolled in the program:

• Colonel Zadok Magruder High School
• Georgetown Preparatory School
• Montgomery Blair High School
• Poolesville High School 
• Richard Montgomery High School 
• Springbrook High School 
• Thomas S. Wootton High School 
• Walter Johnson High School 
• Walt Whitman High School 
• Wheaton High School 
• Winston Churchill High School 

Washington also received inquiries from other area schools. He believes this is a testament to the initiative’s success and hopes that the program will continue to grow and help students for years to come.

“Other students going to various universities outside Maryland have reached out and requested a description of our courses or a copy of the exams,” Washington said. “I assume these schools have at least considered letting students take courses that need the advanced course as a prerequisite. It’s a sign that the program is working and helping students get what they need to succeed.”

Written by Georgia Jiang

Three undergraduates in the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics have been awarded 2025 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. 

Over the last 16 years, UMD’s nominations yielded 53 scholarships—second in the nation only to Stanford.

The department’s 2025 Goldwater Scholars are:

• Harikesh Kailad, sophomore mathematics and computer science double major
• Luiz Mata Lopez, junior mathematics and computer science double major
• Benjamin Raufman, junior mathematics and chemistry double-degree student     

They are among 441 Goldwater Scholars selected from 1,350 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.

Since the program's first award in 1989, the Goldwater Foundation has honored 86 winners and five honorable mentions from UMD.

“The 2025 UMD Goldwater scholars are an exceptional group whose current and future research will impact science and society,” said CMNS Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Robert Infantino, who has led UMD’s Goldwater Scholarship nominating process since 2001. “I am especially delighted that a UMD transfer student nominee was named a Scholar for the first time. The competition is also extra challenging for sophomores, so Hari’s accomplishment is also particularly noteworthy.”

Harikesh Kailad

Kailad began conducting research at UMD with Computer Science Professor Bill Gasarch in high school. He currently works in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center with Computer Science Assistant Professor Ian Miers, building systems that enable forums that both preserve privacy and allow for moderation, which helps prevent spammers and trolls. Kailad developed a full-fledged flexible system that allows services such as Wikipedia and Reddit to use his framework. He also began working on a project using multiparty computation for anonymous private state, which is when two or more parties receive an output of a computation based on their combined data without revealing their own data to the other parties.

"Hari has shown consistent initiative, pushing himself in coursework, research and teaching,” Miers said. “As a freshman, he taught a student-led class on binary exploitation with an ambitious plan to cover beyond what is covered in even the upper-level security class. At the same time, he completed an independent study with me on zero-knowledge proofs that resulted in a paper to appear at USENIX Security 2025, a top-tier peer-reviewed venue in computer security research.”

Kailad also works with Dana Dachman-Soled, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, on the security of post-quantum systems. This collaboration began when Kailad participated in the Research Experience for Undergraduates in Combinatorics, Algorithms, and AI for Real Problems at UMD.

Cryptography currently used to secure the web is vulnerable to attacks by quantum computers, but the security of post-quantum cryptosystems being deployed is not well studied. Kailad wrote code to attack Kyber, a post-quantum cryptosystem finalized by the NIST standardization process. His attack transforms side-channel information that leaks from the system into algebraic information that can then be used to attack the system and find secret keys. 

Kailad serves as president of the Cybersecurity Club, designed and taught two student-initiated courses, cofounded a theoretical computer science reading group, and is a member of a top-ranking Capture the Flag team that participates in cybersecurity competitions on the international level. While at UMD, he received a CMNS Alumni Network Summer Research Award and a Maryland Cybersecurity Center Travel Grant.

After graduation, Kailad plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science and contribute to cryptography and private technology development.

“I am extremely excited about recent advancements in security and cryptography and strongly interested in bringing anonymity and privacy to the web by using and improving privacy-enhancing technologies and answering questions about the security and efficiency of such systems,” he said.

Luiz Mata Lopez

Mata Lopez is a first-generation college student who was directly admitted to UMD’s limited-enrollment computer science program as a transfer student from Montgomery College in fall 2023.

He was not unfamiliar with the College Park campus, though. He spent the summer of 2022 at UMD participating in a Research Experiences for Undergraduates program called BRIDGE (Bioinformatics Research In Data science for GEnomics), which is run by the UMD Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. In the BRIDGE program, Mata Lopez worked with Computer Science Assistant Professor Erin Molloy to computationally address the problem of estimating the evolutionary histories of many species. Specifically, he worked to speed up the performance of an existing software package to improve usability for biologists. 

After transferring to UMD, he rejoined Molloy’s research group to develop methods for fast reconstruction of tumor evolution. He conducted a preliminary study elucidating the detrimental effects of using standard approaches on cancer data and started working on multiple algorithms that address large-scale genome losses, which refer to a significant evolutionary process involving the deletion of extensive portions of a genome.

"Luiz is extremely talented. In our group meetings, he regularly presents his own algorithmic ideas at the whiteboard and responds to questions on the fly—skills typically honed during the transition from undergraduate to graduate studies,” Molloy said. “He is also deeply passionate about STEM research and has presented at Montgomery College and other forums to inspire fellow undergraduates to get involved. I am excited to see Luiz's proposed research come to fruition with the generous support of the Goldwater Scholarship."

Beginning in summer 2023, Mata Lopez interned at the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine on a project to use nanopore sequencing to elucidate the biological mechanisms of mobile DNA elements in the context of cancer development.

Last summer, he interned at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard on a dilated cardiomyopathy drug discovery pipeline. He merged imaging datasets from CRISPR and known responsive drug screens and analyzed them to identify gene edits that have similar effects as the drugs. 

Mata Lopez served as a Montgomery College STEM Ambassador and received the Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship and Frederick Douglass Scholarship from UMD. His passion for education led him to create educational content with students nationwide to introduce biological sciences majors to bioinformatics software development. 

Mata Lopez plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, specializing in computational biology and statistical methods to better understand the origins of genetic disorders.

“I aim to address the genetic origins of diseases that have long mystified clinicians,” he said. “Recent computational advancements have enabled biomedical data analysis at an incredibly large scale and have led to a better understanding of disease mechanisms and rapid drug development.”

Benjamin Raufman

Raufman, a Banneker/Key Scholarship recipient in the Integrated Life Sciences program in the Honors College, has been conducting research in a chemistry lab at Towson University since his sophomore year of high school.

There, he investigates the synthesis and properties of inorganic nanostructures, specifically gold nanoclusters. Raufman developed a reliable and reproducible synthetic protocol to make platinum-doped gold-11 nanoclusters—research he published in a first-author paper earlier this year. Platinum doping enhances the reactivity and stability of the gold nanoclusters and alters the electronic and optical properties of the nanoclusters, leading to unique characteristics. He also helped engineer nanoclusters with fluorescent ligands, which led to a co-authored paper published in 2024.

He was honored with a Maryland American Chemical Society Chapter Summer Research Grant in 2022, and his research presentation was selected for the prestigious Sci-Mix at the American Chemical Society Spring Meeting in 2024.

"I have known Benjamin for five-plus years, and he has consistently demonstrated exceptional scientific knowledge and experimental skill. This includes reading the literature, thinking critically and independence in designing experiments,” said Mary Sajini Devadas, an associate professor of chemistry at Towson University.  “Since joining my lab as a sophomore in high school as part of my 2020 TU foundation grant titled ‘Building Science Identity: Fostering STEM influx from local high schools,’ he has worked nonstop while balancing his coursework and research."

Since his freshman year at UMD, Raufman also worked with Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Srinivasa Raghavan to assess the effectiveness of polymer-based hemostatic agents needed during surgery and in emergency rooms to control bleeding after traumatic injury. 

For the past two summers, Raufman interned with Jian-Ying Wang, the Joseph and Corrine Schwartz Professor of Surgery and a Professor of Pathology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. There, he investigated the roles of circular RNAs, specifically circCdr1as, in regulating intestinal mucosal regeneration and human diseases. Through this work, he co-authored a paper published in 2024 in the journal JCI Insight.

Outside of class, Raufman is a refugee youth tutor and emergency department volunteer, and he played alto saxophone in the University Jazz Band. After he graduates, he plans to pursue an M.D./Ph.D. in structural biology.

“I aim to advance the mechanistic understanding of cancer with the long-term goal of developing novel targeted therapies,” he said. “My clinical experience will ground my research in real-world relevance and enable me to translate advances in structural and chemical biology into clinically efficacious and affordable treatments.”

Written by Abby Robinson