2024-25 Notables
With the change in format from a yearly print newsletter to a quarterly release, we have some notable news to catch up on. Here's some bright points along the way this last academic year.
Alex Wein and Sameer Iyer win NSF CAREER awards
Alex Wein and Sameer Iyer have both won a prestigious NSF CAREER award this academic year.
Alex Wein was awarded in January 2025. Alex explains: "I'm very grateful to receive this funding, which will support two lines of research that I'm excited about. The first involves understanding fundamental tradeoffs between statistical resources (e.g. quantity of data) and computational resources (e.g. runtime) in large-scale statistical inference problems. The second involves finding optimal algorithms for various inference problems on tensor-valued data (e.g. an n-by-n-by-n array), including the 3-dimensional reconstruction problem that arises in cryo-electron microscopy."
Sameer Iyer was awarded more recently, in August 2025. More can be found about Iyer's research and award in the feature article by L&S Magazine.
Art Krener recognized with Quazza Medal
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Art Krener has been selected as the 2026 winner of the Quazza Medal, which is awarded every three years by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). It is one of the most prestigious awards in control theory, and awarded for lifetime contributions. Krener was recognized "for fundamental contributions to the analysis, estimation, control, and optimization of nonlinear systems." The medal will be officially presented at the 23rd IFAC World Congress in Busan, Korea, August 2026.
Shkoller and Fraas speak at ICMP
The XXI International Congress of Mathematical Physics, in July 2025, took place in beautiful Strasbourg, France. We are delighted that Steve Shkoller was a plenary speaker and that Martin Fraas an invited speaker in the session on Many-body Quantum Systems & Condensed Matter Physics. According to the official ICMP2024 website: "The International Congress on Mathematical Physics, on its three year cycle, is the most important conference of the International Association of Mathematical Physics [...]. It will be a major event, where new results and future challenges will be discussed, illustrating the richness and vitality of Mathematical Physics."
Jacob and co-authors win 2024 Frontiers of Science Award
Adam Jacob, as one of the co-authors of a paper entitled "(1,1) forms with specified Lagrangian phase : a priori estimates and algebraic obstructions," by Tristan C. Collins, Adam Jacob, Shing-Tung Yau, has been selected by the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS), as a recipient of the 2024 Frontiers of Science Award (FSA) in Mathematics.
More details on the L&S News website.
Vazquez elected Fellow of AAAS
She was selected based on her contributions in both outreach and research. Her research spans a broad area of mathematics including low-dimensional topology and knot theory with a view towards applications in molecular biology.
Read the UC Davis article featuring Professor Vasquez.
De Loera recognized with T. Christine Stevens Leadership Award
The T. Christine Stevens Award, named after one of Project Next's co-founders, is awarded by the MAA to recognize persons who have made significant and sustained contributions to cultivating leadership skills within the mathematical sciences. This year, Jesús De Loera has been honored with this award in recognition of his ongoing efforts in training a new generation of leaders in mathematics, and, more specifically, for providing tiered mentoring and networking opportunities for Latinx and Hispanic early career researchers. In the words of Jesús De Loera: "Currently, too much mathematical talent is wasted. Mathematicians need to lead the change and help more people enjoy Mathematics."
Read the UC Davis L&S interview about De Loera's inspiration and work.
Professor Schilling receives Graduate Mentoring Award
Anne Schilling was among the recipients for the 2024 UC Davis Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Awards. She follows in the footsteps of Rishi Chaudhuri, Jesús de Loera, Zhaojun Bai, and Eugene Gorskiy, who received this award in the past two years.
Rohit Thomas wins L&S Teaching Award
The 2025 College of Letters and Science Teaching Award recognizes outstanding teaching, both inside and outside the classroom. Rohit Thomas is one of the drivers behind our weekly pedagogy hangouts, which have been a treasure trove of insight about teaching for many of us.
Luze Xu wins INFORMS Award
Together with an international group of collaborators, postdoctoral scholar Luze Xu has won the INFORMS Optimization Society 2024 Young Researchers Paper Prize for the paper "On the column number and forbidden submatrices for Δ-modular matrices."
Roger Casals awarded MCA Prize
At the Mathematical Congress of the Americas in Miami (MCA2025) in July, Roger Casals was awarded one of the MCA Prizes. Every four years, the MCA prizes are awarded to only 5 mathematicians, who are no more than 12 years post Ph.D., who are either working or completed their graduate studies at an institution within the Americas.
Read the MCA prize article on Casals.
Steve Shkoller to lead COMPASS team at UC Davis
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has announced a new round of Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program Centers (PSAAPCs). One of them, led by the University of New Mexico's Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) involves a collaborative team of universities including UC Davis. The universities will establish a Center for Optimized Modern Parallel Adaptive System Software (COMPASS). The goal of these more focused aspects of the program is to oversee specific research topics in either a science or engineering discipline or an Exascale enabling technology, prioritizing strengthening national security and working towards vital breakthroughs in large-scale simulation science. At UC Davis, operations will be overseen by Professor Steve Shkoller.