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Eight new Van Vleck Assistant Professors arrived in Madison this year, the larger than usual number due to funding from the Department's NSF VIGRE grant (NSF-V), and from Ken Ono's Number Theory Foundation (NTF) and Packard Foundation (PF) Grants, and NSF Career Award (NSF-C).
Weizhu Bao
Weizhu Bao received the PhD from
Tsinghua University in
1995
in the Mathematics of Computation. Since then he has held
positions at Imperial College, Tsinghua University, and Georgia
Institute of Technology. His research interests include
computational fluid dynamics, finite element methods for nonlinear
problems, and numerical methods for partial differential equations
in unbounded domains.
Yiftach Barnea
Yiftach Barnea received the PhD in 1999 from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem with a thesis ``Pro-p groups and Lie
Algebras" written under the guidance of Aner Shalev. He spent
1999-2000 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at MSRI (Berkeley). Yiftach's
research interests are in pro-p groups, Lie algebras, Kac-Moody
algebras, and finite p-groups.
Jan Bruinier
Jan Bruinier received the PhD in 1998 from the University of
Heidelberg (Germany). After the PhD he was given an appointment at
Heidelberg. His UW appointment is partly funded by the grants NTF,
PF, and NSF-C. Very recently, Jan has been awarded a habilitation
degree by the University of Heidelberg. Habilitation degrees are
awarded, by German universities, to those researchers who have
established a superb track record (sort of a ``super PhD''). It is
quite unusual to be awarded such a degree only two years from the
PhD. Dr. Bruinier's research interests are in number theory,
in particular, Borcherds theory of infinite products in
automorphic forms and modular forms.
Rebecca Field
Rebecca Field received the PhD from the University of
Chicago in 2000. Her thesis ``On the Chow ring of the classifying
space BSO(2n,C) was guided by Burt Totaro. She lists her
research interests as interactions between algebraic cycles
and group actions (and consequences in representation theory), and
connections between algebraic geometry and algebraic topology.
Rebecca is one of our VIGRE Van Vlecks being partially supported
by our NSF-V grant.
Jeremy Lovejoy
Jeremy Lovejoy was co-advised by George Andrews and Ken Ono
at Pennsylvania State University where he received the PhD in
2000. Jeremy is also a VIGRE Van Vleck partially supported by our
NSF-V grant. He list his research interests as partitions and
q-series, modular forms, and combinatorics.
With Ken Ono, Jeremy recently has helped shed new light on
Ramanujuan's congruences for the partition function (see the
article on Ken Ono's PECASE Award).
Ernesto Lupercio
Ernesto Lupercio received the PhD from Stanford University in 1997 with a thesis ``New holomorphic versions of the Bott periodicity.'' He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan from 1997-2000, spending 1998 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, Germany. Ernesto lists his research interests as algebraic topology, loop groups, mathematical physics, and algebraic geometry.
Charles McCoy
Charles McCoy finished his PhD thesis in 2000 at
the University of Notre Dame. His thesis ``Categoricity,
dimension, and relativization'' was guided by Peter Cholak
(PhD 1991, T. Millar and S. Lempp). Also a VIGRE Van Vleck being
partially supported by our NSF-V grant, Charles has research
interests in mathematical logic, computability theory, and model
theory; much of his current works involves finding natural
characterizations of certain computability-theoretic notions in
models.
Wojciech Wieczorek
Wojciech Wieczorek received the PhD in 1995 from
Michigan State University. His thesis ``Donaldson invariants and
embedded 2-spheres'' was guided by Ronald Fintuschel. Before
coming to Madison, Wojciech was a post-doctoral associate and
instructor at the University of Georgia. His research interests
include low dimensional topology and symplectic geometry, and
Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants,
Continuing Van Vlecks this year are Markus Banagl, Rajesh
Kulkarni, and Bo Su. Continuing VIGRE Van Vlecks are Dan Knopf and
Christopher Raymond.