2025 Simons Fellow in Mathematics

The Department of Mathematics is delighted to announce that Professor Cristian D.
Popescu was awarded one of the 2025 Simons Fellowships in Mathematics by the
Simons Foundation.

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons-fellows-in-mathematics/?tab=awardees

Professor Popescu will use this award to spend the 2025-2026 academic year as a
Visiting Fellow at Princeton University and as a Member of the School Mathematics at
the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. While in Princeton, Professor Popescu will
investigate new approaches to the theory of special values of motivic L-functions, a
central area of research within number theory and arithmetic geometry.

This is Professor Popescu’s second Simons Fellowship, following a 2015-2016 award
spent as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University.

The Simons Foundation, established in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons, advances the
frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences through grant funding,
support for research and public engagement (https://www.simonsfoundation.org).

Congratulations to our 11 undergraduate math majors who have been named among the recipients of the 2024-2025 Dean's Undergraduate Award for Excellence!  The recipients are Yu Shang, Varun Sreedhar, Brian Ton, Pranav Reddy, Daniel Monroe, Mica Li, Adi Krishnamoorthy, Eric Nguyen, Rita Yujia Wu, Jihyun In, and Alisha Foster.

Congratulations to the 2024-2025 Carol & George Lattimer Award for Graduate Excellence math major recipient, Sawyer Robertson!

Congratulations to incoming faculty member Federico Pasqualotto on receiving the Stefan Bergman Fellowship from the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Federico's research interests center on the partial differential equations of mathematical physics that arise in several physical theories: fluid mechanics, nonlinear wave equations, mathematical general relativity and dispersive equations.

Learn more about the fellowship on the AMS website.

Two of our remarkable PhD students have been selected for inclusion in the Student Spotlight section of the Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Affairs website.  Lillian McPherson, a student in algebraic geometry with Elham Izadi and Sawyer Robertson, a student in applied graph theory with Alex Cloninger, were chosen to represent the Math department in this year's Spotlight.  Be sure to check out their profiles, and those of students from across the university, here.

Professor Jeffrey Rabin has been selected as an outstanding mentor in the Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars Program 2024.  The SGTS program has helped hundreds of graduate students prepare for and teach summer courses for undergraduates. This program offers advanced graduate students a valuable opportunity to gain faculty-mentored teaching experience while expanding Summer Session course offerings for undergraduates.  Professor Rabin was commended for both the quality and quantity of student support, and for playing a significant role in his mentee's growth and development as an instructor.

Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics and Computer Science & Engineering, Fan Chung Graham is one of five recipients of the 2024 Revelle Medal.  Created to honor Roger Revelle and first awarded in 1981, the Revelle Medal honors a record of accomplishment that advances UC San Diego in fulfillment of the campus mission of exceptional teaching, research, service, and is the highest honor given by the chancellor to an emeriti faculty member. 

The inaugural Paul Erdos Chair of Combinatorics, Professor Chung Graham is a researcher in Combinatorics and Graph Theory.  She is the author of more than 240 papers, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Mathematics Society among others.  Professor Chung Graham received the Euler Medal in 2017 and the Allendoerfer Award in 1990 and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorics.

A video honoring Professor Chung Graham can be found here.

Congratulations to Freddie Manners on receiving the prestigious European Congress of Mathematics (EMS) Prize for "his remarkable contributions to additive combinatorics and related areas, in particular to the foundations of higher-order Fourier analysis, as well as for miscellaneous other results such as the solution of the pyjama problem."

You can read more about the prizes on the EMS website.