Two professors look back on long, distinguished careers.

Joel Cohen 

Anyone who has been to the Department of Mathematics’ holiday party in the past four decades will know Professor Emeritus Joel Cohen. He was the guy with the microphone challenging revelers to math-related limerick contests and handing out fake prizes, like “a trillion dollars” or the James A. Yorke Rotunda: “Very spacious, fits in most apartments and houses. Keep it inside. Or put it in your yard—just don’t take it home until after the party.”

Cohen is not a shy man. And his enthusiasm for UMD extends way beyond ensuring a good time at a party. Cohen has actively sought to improve the lives of Terps and others in the community since arriving at UMD in 1975. Over the course of his tenure, he led or served on nearly two dozen committees, commissions and task forces, focused on everything from faculty affairs and student conduct to women’s issues and student athlete welfare. 

Cohen was a founding member of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics and the first ombudsperson for the university. He led the University Senate as its chair from 2003 to 2004 and chaired the Council of University System Faculty, which advises the chancellor and reports to the Board of Regents, from 1995 to 1996. In January 2020, Cohen and his wife, Susan Chapin (B.A. ’91, interior design), created the Cohen-Chapin Graduate Student Travel Endowment to help young mathematicians at Maryland attend career-enhancing conferences. 

Outside of work, Cohen has been equally active. He served as the national chair of Americans for Democratic Action and as president of his synagogue. Cohen’s commitment to civic engagement is rooted in his boyhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. 

“I grew up listening to politics with my father,” Cohen remembered. “My parents were members of every anti-discrimination group that was around.” 

He remembers political conversations as a regular feature in his household. He also remembers his parents’ appreciation for academia and education. Cohen’s mother was a teacher, and although his father worked in the clothing industry, he always wanted to be a chemist. Some of their inquiring spirit surely rubbed off.

“I think theoretical mathematics is endlessly fascinating,” Cohen said. “It’s the discovery. What an amazing thing to find something that you know nobody in all of history has ever known, an eternal truth that’s been there but no one has known it.” 

Early in his career, Cohen was intrigued by the idea of applying mathematical methods and concepts to language and linguistic systems. After earning a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Brown University, he went to MIT to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, and studied with the famed linguist and cognitive scientist, Noam Chomsky. 

He even wrote a paper that Chomsky published in 1967 asserting that two types of grammar were mathematically equivalent. The paper, which solved part of a problem that Cohen said later became known as the Chomsky Conjecture, turned out to be the subject of a decades-long debate that wasn’t fully resolved until the late 1990s. Cohen, was unaware of the controversy, however, because the field of mathematical linguistics turned into a mere side interest, and he quickly moved on to his primary focus.

Cohen began his career studying algebraic topology, which uses abstract algebra to study topological spaces, and teaching at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. After arriving at UMD, he found a new path when he met Alessandro Figà Talamanca, a visiting Italian mathematician. Figà Talamanca inspired him to combine harmonic analysis and the study of infinite trees (a form of graph that does not contain a circular path). 

Cohen quickly found himself making frequent trips to Italy to collaborate. He began teaching and giving lectures in Perugia, Milan, Rome and Bari, a city in southeastern Italy. He eventually bought an apartment in Bari. In the 1980s, he divided his time between Maryland and Italy. Since then, he has continued to spend one to two months every year in Bari. Now that he is retiring, he looks forward to spending more time in Italy, indulging his interests in Italian food and art when travel is feasible again. 

John Millson

Professor Emeritus John Millson grew up in Ontario, Canada, but he found his community all over the world through the field of mathematics. 

“I’ve had some 20 collaborators,” Millson recalled. “From France, Germany, India, Russia and the U.S. Some of them I’ve been very close with, and of the 90-some papers I’ve written, at least 70 of them were collaborations.” 

Millson considers it a highlight of his career that he was able to work with people he grew to call friends, like Stephen Kudla from the University of Toronto, William Goldman from UMD and Misha Kapovich from the University of California, Davis. 

As a theoretical mathematician, Millson studies differential geometry with a focus on discrete subgroups of Lie groups, which are fundamental in number theory and algebraic geometry. But he began his journey to math by way of physics. 

After high school, Millson expected to study physics at a Canadian university where he was offered a scholarship. But his father had other ideas. Despite the cost of going to a private school in the U.S., the elder Millson arranged for a friend who had gone to MIT to convince his son that MIT was a better choice. 

“My father’s friend made a very persuasive argument that if I went to MIT instead of a Canadian university, I would end up ahead,” Millson recalled. “It was very generous on the part of my father, and, naturally, it changed the course of my career.”

At MIT, Millson quickly found his calling in mathematics. He remembers being captivated by the n-dimensional version of Stokes’ theorem in his second year. With just four symbols on the left of the equation and four symbols on the right, the theorem encapsulates several different theorems from vector calculus and is fundamental in geometry and physics.

“It’s this really beautiful formula,” Millson said. “Until you study mathematics, you don’t know what an incredibly beautiful world it is, in the way that just a few symbols can explain many seemingly unrelated things.”

After spending his junior year at the University of Paris, Millson received his B.S. in mathematics from MIT and went on to earn his Ph.D. in mathematics from University of California, Berkeley. Millson then took a job at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a year later became an assistant professor at Yale University in 1974. 

His ease at making friends in the math world paid off when he found himself on sabbatical with a round-the-world ticket and a cadre of colleagues overseas. He had received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1978 and spent the fall semester at Oxford University. That left the spring open for travel.

“Pan-Am [the now defunct airline] was selling around-the-world-in-80-days tickets for a thousand dollars,” Millson recounted. “You had to keep going in the same direction, but you could stop anywhere along the way for as long as you liked during that 80 days. I had friends all over the world, so I went to Tokyo to work with friends at the University of Tokyo. And I went to Hong Kong and Mumbai to work with his friends at the Tata Institute.”

It’s no surprise that it was a collaboration that brought Millson to UMD as a visiting professor in 1986. Millson was a professor at UCLA at the time. He and Goldman had published a paper that included a conjecture they couldn’t quite prove. In response to the paper, Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne sent Millson a five-page letter guiding him toward the solution.

“The letter contained a remarkable new idea about deformation theory, and I was stunned at the magnitude of the idea and the extraordinary generosity of Deligne that he had handed this to us,” Millson said. “So, I wrote to Bill [Goldman] and said, ‘Bill, I’m coming to Maryland and we’re going to work this out.’”

Deligne's five-page letter led to a two-year collaboration, a 51-page paper in the prestigious journal Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS and an invitation for Millson to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto in 1990.

During the time he was working with Goldman in Maryland, Millson felt welcomed and appreciated. He also felt right at home on the campus golf course. When he was invited to join the faculty in 1989, he readily made the cross-country move. 

In addition to professional support and friendship, Millson credits the mathematics community with helping him through challenges in his personal life. Twice widowed, Millson said his continuing collaborations with brilliant mathematicians and good friends provided him great comfort through the years. As a reminder of that support, Millson keeps the conference poster from a 2008 birthday celebration the department held in his honor hanging on the wall of his living room. The poster is especially meaningful to him because it was designed by his friend and former UMD mathematics faculty member Richard Schwartz.

When reflecting on his long career, Millson often refers to a quote he heard 37 years ago. In 1983, while Millson was at the Institute for Advanced Study, he was an invited speaker at the 60th birthday conference for the Swiss mathematician Armand Borel. In Borel’s closing speech, he quoted the famous baseball player Willie Mays as saying “getting paid for playing baseball was like getting paid for eating ice cream.”

That quote stuck with Millson, and to this day, it describes how he feels about the career he was fortunate to have in mathematics. And like ice cream, mathematics is something he intends to enjoy for many years to come, even after his retirement.

Ph.D. student Zuping Wang hopes to combine her medical background with mathematics to help discover new cancer therapies.

 As the chair of the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics, Doron Levy knows most of the students in his department who have unique educational backgrounds, but one very interesting student slipped under his radar: Zuping Wang.

Wang was a medical doctor and practicing pediatrician in her home country of China for years, until she decided she was ready for a change.

“I didn’t like the schedule that went along with being a doctor,” Wang said. “I wanted a job where I didn’t have to work nights.”

Wang’s desire for a new career brought her to UMD in fall 2016 for her bachelor’s degree in mathematics. She transferred from the Community College of Baltimore County, hoping to take a different approach to her original interest in medicine.

 “I started Googling schools and came across interesting research around mathematical modeling for cancer research that was happening at the university,” Wang said. “The research seems like a great way to approach cancer treatment, so I applied to UMD hoping to be a part of that work.”

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in mathematics in spring 2019, Wang is now pursuing her Ph.D. in applied mathematics & statistics, and scientific computation (AMSC) at Maryland.

“What is unique about Zuping is that she is a doctor with postdoctorate training, and she decided that she wants to study math, so she just enrolled at College Park as an undergraduate student and did the entire undergraduate curriculum. Only after she got her undergraduate degree did she apply to graduate school,” said Levy, who is now Wang’s advisor. “Normally, if people make a late-career change, they don't start completely from scratch. But Zuping didn't try to take any shortcuts.”

Wang didn’t come to Levy’s attention until it was time to review applications for graduate admissions.

“That was really bizarre,” Levy said. “I work with math and medicine, so such students will usually find me, even as undergrads, and let me know that they are interested in that type of research.”

“Once I learned about Zuping,” Levy recalled, “I reached out to her and proposed that we meet, and I heard her very interesting story firsthand. We immediately found some common interests and started working on research together.”

Shortly after Wang was admitted to the graduate program, she and Levy published a paper together in the Journal of Theoretical Biology on the use of adoptive T-cell-based immunotherapy to treat cervical cancer.

Wang’s Ph.D. research is supported by the NCI-UMD Partnership for Integrative Cancer Research. The partnership, which was created in 2010, pairs UMD students with mentors from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and UMD to tackle pressing challenges in cancer research. 

Wang and Levy teamed up with Peter Choyke and Noriko Sato from NCI’s Molecular Imaging Branch, and with Wang’s medical background, she is perfectly placed at the center of the research.

“This group is an experimental group and they have a lot of exciting unpublished data about different cutting-edge therapies for cancer,” Levy explained. “Sometimes the therapies work and sometimes they don’t, and Zuping brings some quantitative understanding into the picture. Our goal is to understand why sometimes therapies work and some other times they do not. We hope that such studies will provide guidance to improving current therapeutical approaches.”

Wang credits her success at Maryland thus far in part to her relationship with Levy.

“I needed someone to help me with the math modeling part of the cancer research,” Wang said. “I didn’t know beforehand that mathematical modeling could be used for this. [Levy] has helped me a lot and whenever I am struggling, he always gives me good instructions and advice. He is a good advisor.”

Once she graduates, Wang plans to continue her work on mathematical modeling to improve cancer treatment and other therapies. 

“Zuping’s unique background will open a lot of doors for her,” Levy said. “The sky's the limit.”

Written by Chelsea Torres

He has worked on signal processing noise and lithium-ion battery research at UMD.

Jesse Matthews, a junior chemical engineering and mathematics dual-degree student at the University of Maryland, was awarded a 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. 

Matthews, who is also a Banneker/Key Scholar and member of the University Honors program in the Honors College, was one of four Goldwater Scholars selected at UMD this year. Over the last decade, UMD’s nominations yielded 33 scholarships—the most in the nation, followed by Stanford University with 32. 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. These scholarships are a stepping-stone to future support for the students’ research careers. 

Matthews worked for two summers with Radu Balan, a professor of mathematics and the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, to improve noise reduction in signal processing for speech recognition and X-ray crystallography.

Now, he is working to make safer lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries typically contain a liquid electrolyte, through which the lithium ions move. Matthews is developing new, non-flammable solid polymer electrolytes, which would be inherently safer than liquid electrolytes for applications like implanted biomedical devices.

Matthews has synthesized and characterized two solid polymer electrolytes. The first allows lithium metal to be safely used as the battery anode, which results in a battery with higher energy density. The second incorporates water as a component, which results in improved battery safety and no need for a dry manufacturing environment. Matthews demonstrated that batteries incorporating these electrolytes can function for hundreds of charge-discharge cycles without significant fade in energy output. Next, he plans to characterize and improve the interfaces between the electrolytes and electrodes to improve battery cell performance.

Matthews co-authored a paper in the journal Electrochimica Acta and was selected as the top student poster presenter in a fuels, petrochemicals and energy category at the 2019 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting.

“These are remarkable accomplishments for an undergraduate and clearly demonstrate a strong work ethic,” Kofinas said. “I am confident he will contribute to many more impactful experimental results over the remainder of his undergraduate career. 

Matthews also takes time to help others. Last summer, he mentored four high-school students on a research project as part of the university’s ESTEEM (Engineering Science and Technology to Energize and Expand Young Minds) Summer Engineering Research-Quest for underrepresented minorities.

“Our scholars are a uniquely talented group, already making discoveries in their fields of study—from developing more stable batteries and innovative power supplies to streamlining the pathway of drug design and understanding the contributions of RNA in cancer and other diseases,” 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.

Written by Abby Robinson