William Meeks, who is the George David Birkoff Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the fall semester of 2006. Professor Meeks was one of 187 out of approximately 3,000 applicants to receive this s prestigious award from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The foundation offers fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed. These fellowships are a great honor not only to those who receive them, but also to the universities whose professors receive them.
Professor Meeks plans to use his fellowship during the 7-month period July 2006 - February 2007, devoting his time and energy to his research project on minimal surfaces. He will spend much of that period at the University of Granada in Granada, Spain and will also travel to the University of Nice in Nice, France, to IMPA in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Rice University in Houston, to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and to Harvard University. The purpose of many of these trips is to carry out joint research with collaborators at these other locations.
Professor Meeks is a world-renowned expert in his field of research, which includes low dimensional topology and the global properties of minimal surfaces in three dimensional spaces. The title of his research project is "The Global Structure of Complete Embedded Minimal Surfaces in Three-Manifolds".
Eduardo Cattani, Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to do research and lecture at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina during the 2005-2006 academic year, according to the Unites States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Professor Cattani will do research in algebraic geometry.
Professor Cattani is one of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad to some 140 countries for the 2005-2006 academic year through the Fulbright Scholar Program. Established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the program’s purpose is to build mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.
The Fulbright Program, America’s flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 58 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have studied, taught or done research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the U.S. They are among more than 265,000 American and foreign university students, K-12 teachers, and university faculty and professionals who have participated in Fulbright exchange programs.
Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement and because they demonstrated extraordinary leadership potential in their fields. Among thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel Corporation.
from the National Science Foundation
by Richard S. Ellis
Professor Panayotis Kevrekidis, a member of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts since September 2001, has been selected to receive a $400,000 award by the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. Such an award is often considered to be the most prestigious that the National Science Foundation bestows upon young faculty members, recognizing and supporting the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. It is a great honor for Professor Kevrekidis to be selected for this special funding and for our department to have as a faculty member such a productive and outstanding scientist.
The focus of Professor Kevrekidis' research proposal is the exciting topic of Bose-Einstein condensation in gases, a new form of matter at the coldest temperatures in the universe. Predicted in the work of Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924, achieved in the laboratory in 1995, and honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, Bose-Einstein condensation is now the object of intensive and ever growing theoretical and experimental study. Reasons for the excitement about this topic are its relevance to areas such as superconductivity and superfluidity---the subject of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003---and its potential applicability to numerous areas including quantum computation and atom lasers.
In his research program, Professor Kevrekidis will examine the behavior of solitary, nonlinear wave structures in the setting of Bose-Einstein condensates. The effort will be undertaken at three different levels: creating the solitary waves, manipulating the waves, and combining the waves to create patterns. His multidisciplinary research combines sophisticated mathematical analysis, fundamental physical principles, and powerful computational resources. Professor Kevrekidis' expertise in each of these diverse areas is a key reason for his having been selected to receive the prestigious CAREER award.
After receiving his Ph.D. in the Department of Physics at Rutgers University in 2000, Professor Kevrekidis spent the following academic year as a joint postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Nonlinear Studies and in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. Professor Kevrekidis is a prolific researcher, having published nearly 100 papers in the top journals in mathematical physics.
At the heart of the research program supported by his CAREER award is its educational component. Professor Kevrekidis hopes to use the award to train applied mathematicians from the undergraduate to the postdoctoral level to work in diverse areas of application involving condensed matter and atomic physics, nonlinear optics, and wave phenomena. It is not a surprise that Professor Kevrekidis puts special emphasis upon the educational component of his work. As a complement to his prolific and deep research in mathematics and physics, Professor Kevrekidis has also been a devoted and extremely popular teacher of undergraduates at the university. He was recently nominated for a Distinguished Teacher Award.
Professor Emeritus Wallace Martindale's paper
"On Herstein's Lie map conjectures, III"
(with Beidar, KI;Bresar, M;Chebotar, MA)
Journal of Algebra 249 (2002) 59-94
is highlighted as one of the
Fast Breaking Papers
among
22 broad fields of science
in
ISI Essential Science
Indicators.
This designation is given to papers that comprise the top 1% of papers in each
field and each year from 1993 through 2003.
Click
here
to read ISI's interview with Professor Martindale.
Back To Main Page