Congratulations to Fall 2025 PhD graduate Kehan Long, who has been awarded the Dean's Dissertation Award for his thesis "Certifiable Robot Control under Uncertainty: Towards Safety, Stability, and Robustness."  Kehan's thesis advisors were Professors Melvin Leok (Mathematics), Nikolay Atanasov (ECE) and Jorge Cortés (MAE).  Kehan's research interest lies at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory, with a focus on enabling reliable robot autonomy.  He is currently working on general-purpose robotic learning with SceniX AI. 

Congratulations to Professor Robert Webber on his selection as a 2026-27 Hellman Fellow.  Professor Webber is interested in randomized numerical methods and their applications to data science and scientific computing. Specifically, his work focuses on randomized algorithms and their applications to chemistry, astronomy, and geophysics.

Congratulations to Professor Vishal Patil on his selection as a 2026-27 Hellman Fellow.  Professor Patil's research focuses on problems in applied mathematics, with an emphasis on living systems, soft matter and fluid dynamics. A central theme is exploring the role of geometry, topology and information in these systems.

Well deserved congratulations to Algebraic Number Theorist, Aaron Pollack who has received two recent honors.  Aaron has been named as a 2026 Simons Fellowship in Mathematics and one of 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows.  Aaron's research concerns automorphic forms, their arithmetic properties, and their L-functions. His most recent works develop properties of automorphic forms on exceptional groups.

Congratulations to Alex Cloninger on receiving a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics.  Alex researches problems in the area of geometric data analysis and applied harmonic analysis, with a focus on approaches that model the data as being locally lower dimensional, including data concentrated near manifolds or subspaces.  These types of problems arise in a number of scientific disciplines, including imaging, medicine, and artificial intelligence, and the techniques developed relate to a number of machine learning and statistical algorithms, including deep learning, network analysis, and measuring distances between probability distributions.  His current research plans are to develop new algorithms grounded in geometric methods that are both computationally efficient and theoretically rigorous.

Professor Jiawang Nie was one of 25 members recognized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for their outstanding research and service to the community.  Professor Nie was recognized for contributions to optimization, tensor computation, truncated moment problems, and convex algebraic geometry.

Congratulations to Mathematics PhD student Johnny (Jingze) Li on his selection for the 2026 Barbara and Paul Saltman Excellent Teaching Award for Graduate Students.  Johnny's research is in the emergent phenomenon of artificial and biological neural networks.  He has taught for both the Mathematics and Bioengineering departments in a wide variety of courses as TA and as Associate Instructor for lower-division Differential Equations.

Join us in congratulating Dimitri Dine, who has been awarded a Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF)  for 2026-2027. Dimitri is one of nine recipients of the fellowship.

The Jane Street GRF is open to students in the U.S., Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand, and supports exceptional doctoral students currently pursuing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science, mathematics, physics, or statistics. It is a highly selective award. 

Dimitri  is pursuing his Ph.D. in Mathematics at UC San Diego and is advised by Kiran Kedlaya. His research area is non-archimedean geometry, which studies questions at the intersection of algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory by using methods from nonarchimedean analysis. In his research, he seeks to establish new connections between algebraic and metric properties in nonarchimedean Banach rings, combining the points of view of nonarchimedean analysis and commutative algebra. On the geometric side, he studies foundational questions in the theory of adic spaces, such as their formal models. 

More information about the award may be found at https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/programs-and-events/grf-profiles-2026/

Assistant Professor Morris Ang has received the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability 2026 New Researcher Award in Probability Theory. The Bernoulli Society was founded in 1975 as a Section of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). Established in 1885, the ISI is one of the oldest scientific associations operating in the modern world.

The Bernoulli Society supports the advancement of the sciences of probability (including stochastic processes) and mathematical statistics and of their applications to all those aspects of human endeavour which are directed towards the increase of natural knowledge and the welfare of mankind.

Morris Ang received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2022. He then spent two years at Columbia University as a Junior Fellow of the Simons Society of Fellows before joining the faculty at UC San Diego in 2024. Ang’s research interests are in Probability Theory, especially random conformal geometry: Schramm‑Loewner evolution, Liouville quantum gravity, random planar maps, and conformal field theories.

We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of our colleague Benedict (“Dick”) Gross on December 19, 2025.

Benedict Gross was a distinguished and profoundly influential number theorist, best known for the Gross–Zagier theorem on the L-functions of elliptic curves, as well as numerous other fundamental contributions to algebraic number theory, representation theory, and arithmetic geometry. His many honors included a MacArthur Fellowship (1986), the Cole Prize in Algebra (1987), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992), the National Academy of Sciences (2004), and the American Philosophical Society (2017).

After spending most of his mathematical career as a professor at Harvard University (1985–2015), Dick joined the UCSD Department of Mathematics, where he taught several inspiring graduate courses and played an important role in the research life of our department, particularly within our number theory group. Dick was a generous mentor to students and junior faculty, widely admired for his charisma, depth and clarity of thought, intellectual generosity, and unyielding commitment to the mathematical community.

Benedict Gross will be deeply missed by the number theory community and the broader mathematical world. For more than four decades, he shaped the field through profound mathematical contributions and exceptional dedication as a teacher, mentor, leader, and colleague. We extend our deepest condolences to his wife, Professor of Medicine Jill Mesirov, his sons Sam and Isaac, and his three grandsons.

While we develop more material for our website, please refer to the tribute posted by Harvard University:

https://www.math.harvard.edu/in-memory-of-professor-emeritus-benedict-gross/