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

Joan Jian-Jian Ren is elected as a Fellow of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics)

Antonio De Rosa receives the Career Award from the NSF 

Rodrigo Trevino receives the Career Award from the NSF

Partha Lahiri recieves the Jerzy Neyman Medal

Lei Chen recieves the Sloan Fellowship 

Eitan Tadmor recieves the 2022 AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics

Eitan Tadmor named the 2022 Gibbs Lecturer

Eitan Tadmor named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

Alumni

Bianca Viray,( UMD 2005), has been awarded the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars for the 2022–2023 academic year.

Graduate Students

Shuo Yang has been awarded the Babuška Endowed Student Award for Graduate Research in Mathematics.

Luke (Andrew) Evans -Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award Graduate School 

Melanka Saroad Wedige, Jordan Hirsh, Jackson Hopper - Ralph P Pass III Award

Lucas Bouck, Xuze Zhang - Mark E. Lachtman Award 

Arghya Sadhukhan and Yuxiang Ji -Patrick & Marguerite Sung Fellowship in Mathematics

Yifan Yang, Shuo Yan, Xiaoyu Zhou, Vasanth Pidaparthy, Melanka Saroad Wedige, Jackson Hopper, Shenghao Li, Zhiming Li, Chengze Duan, Soumojit Das, Ying Li, Eric Oden - Hauptman Summer Fellowship

Sze-Hong Kwong, Shin Eui Song, Keith Mills, Vlasios Mastrantonis -Hauptman Summer Research Award

Zhirui Li ,Prakhar Gupta, Max Springer, Jian-Long (John) Liu, Revati Jadhav, Mengting Chao, David Russell, HaeYun Seo - Aziz/Osborn Gold Medal in Teaching Excellence

Stavros Papathanasiou, Efstratios  Tsoukanis - Monroe Martin Spotlight Award

Nakyung Lee, Elliott Lehrer - Seymour Goldberg Spotlight Award

Undergraduate Students

Max Springer, Naveen Raman , and Steven Jin - National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships

George Li is named the 2022 Goldwater Scholar

UMD Putnam Team was ranked 20th out of 427 institutions this year.

Steven Jin -The Department of Mathematics Outstanding Senior Award 

Leopold Bertholet- Higginbotham Award

Ruijie Frank  Zheng -Milton Abramowitz Award

Matthew Schneider and Daniel Levy - Daniel Sweet Undergraduate Research Fellowships

John Brownfield - Strauss Scholarship 

David Fang - Dan Shanks Award

Elliot Kienzle - The John and Sabrina Kontner Endowed Scholarship

 Nicholas  Baranello, Daniel Levy, Jiatong Lian, Hugh McLaurin, Reynald  Oliveria, Raymond Schleien, Matthew Schneider, Uma Tikekar, Karthik Sellakumaran Latha - Strauss Teaching Assistantships

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