Mathematics Faculty Fellows

The Mathematics Faculty Fellowships are intended for research faculty below the rank of professor, or professors who are less than 15 years past the Ph.D., and recognize the importance and impact of research support for these colleagues. The Department has selected both Ioana Dumitriu and Paul Hacking to be the latest recipients of this two-year award.

Ioana Dumitriu received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2003 and joined our department in 2006 after holding a Miller Research Fellowship at Berkeley. Her thesis received an Honorable Mention for the 2005 Householder Prize for the best dissertation in numerical analysis in the past three years, and she won the 2007 Leslie Fox Prize for the best paper in numerical analysis by a young researcher in the past two years. Much of her work is at the confluence of numerical analysis and random matrix theory. On the one hand, she uses methods from numerical linear algebra to study random matrix models arising in physics and statistics, and on the other, she applies results about random matrices to find faster algorithms to solve problems in numerical linear algebra.

Paul Hacking received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2001. He subsequently held assistant professorships at Michigan and Yale before joining our department in 2006. Hacking’s research is in the field of algebraic geometry, that is, the study of geometric spaces that can be defined by polynomial equations. Hacking studies the geometry of the space that parametrizes all possible types of algebraic surfaces, particularly the interesting limiting phenomena as the parameters become very large, using techniques from algebra, differential geometry, and topology.

Sara Billey and John Palmieri, who were selected last year, continue as Faculty Fellows this year.