News from 2008-2009

• Professor Richard Wentworth, formerly Chair of the Mathematics Department at Johns Hopkins, is joining the department as a tenured Professor starting Fall 2008. Sandra Cerrai, formerly at the University of Florence in Italy, is joining the department starting Fall 2008 as a tenured Associate Professor. In addition, Antoine Mellet, hired a year ago from the University of British Columbia, is joining the department as an Assistant Professor. And Karin Melnick, currently at Yale University, will be joining the department as an Assistant Professor in fall of 2009.
• For more about some of the new faculty and staff members in the department, see here.
• Dr. Leonid Koralov has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure, effective summer 2008. Dr. Wojtek Czaja and Dr. Dio Margetis have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure, effective summer 2009. Congratulations!
• Professor Chris Laskowski has taken over the jobs of Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Director of the Mathematics Graduate Program, effective July 2008.
• Distinguished University Professor Mark Freidlin gave the Seventy-Sixth Kuwait Foundation Lecture at Cambridge University on April 29, 2008.
• Professor Jonathan Rosenberg has been appointed to the Ruth M. Davis Professorship for 2008-2009.
• Associate Professor Doron Levy's research has been attracting attention in the news media, such as Science News and the UM Newsdesk.
• The first Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems was awarded to Giovanni Forni at the Brin Prize session of the Spring 2008 Brinfest. For photos from that first Brin Prize session, click here.
• Professors Jeffery Cooper and John Osborn retired at the end of the 2007-2008 academic year. A one-day conference on April 4, 2008 celebrated their many accomplishments. We wish them well in their future endeavors.
• Of the four Regional Conferences in the Mathematical Sciences sponsored by the CBMS (Conference Board of the Mathmatical Sciences) and NSF in 2009, two will have principal lecturers from the Maryland Math Department, Jonathan Rosenberg and Scott Wolpert.
• Professor Ricardo Nochetto will be giving the Lipschitz Lectures at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, in January-February 2009.
• We regret to announce the passing of three former members of the department, John Brace, 1926-2008, Richard Good, 1917-2008, and Jim Ortega, 1932-2008. John Brace was a functional analyst and a member of the department from 1953 to 1988. He was known for his famous Tuesday night seminars, from 1957 to 1987, held in the basement of his house in Beltsville, Maryland. He also had the unusual hobby of building and operating large scale model railroads. Richard Good received his Ph.D. at Wisconsin in 1945 and was a fixture in the department, easily recognizable by his famous collection of one-of-a-kind Hawaiian-style shirts, from then until his retirement in 1988. He was the Ph.D. advisor of Herbert Hauptman, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1985. Professor Good has left a very generous bequest to the department, some of which will be used to support the Spotlight on Graduate Research. Jim Ortega was a numerical analyst and applied mathematician. He was a member of the department from 1964 to 1973, when he moved first to the NASA Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering and then (after two years at North Carolina State University) to the University of Virginia.