We hired three new professors this year, all of whom will be showcased in the Junior Colloquium in the coming months. Please come meet all three!
Zaher Hani comes to us from Georgia Tech, where he was a (tenure track) Assistant Professor before we snatched him away for an Associate Professorship (which means tenure). His 2011 PhD was supervised by Terence Tao at UCLA, after which did a post-doc at the Courant Institute in NYC. His research is quite broad, but you might say it is in PDEs. Please come meet him and learn about his mathematics the Junior Colloquium on Friday November 30 at 4 pm in 3088 EH, and for happy hour afterwards. His title is Nonlinear waves: Statistical mechanics and turbulence.
Jenny Wilson joins the University of Michigan from Stanford, where she held the prestigious Szegö Assistant Professorship for four years. Her PhD is from the University of Chicago in 2014, where she was supervised by Benson Farb. Jenny’s works broadly in topology-geometry, of an algebraic flavor, including the red hot area of Representation Stability. Jenny will speak in Junior Colloquium on Representation Stability Friday Feb 15. Come meet her and some other fun professors, postdocs and students!
Alex Wright also joins us formally in January but has been here at UM as a Clay Foundation post-doc all fall. Before coming here, he spent time at Stanford, the Institute for Advanced Study and MSRI. His 2014 PhD was advised by Alex Eskin at the University of Chicago. Alex works broadly in geometry, with papers on topic such as flows on surfaces and geodesics on Teichmuller Space. Alex is a winner of the Michael Brin Dynamical Systems Prize for Young Mathematicians, and an all-around great guy to boot. He will speak in the Junior Colloquium on Billiards, quadrilaterals and moduli spaces, Friday Feb 22.
The Junior Colloquium is a place for graduate students to meet faculty and each other, as well as the occasional alumnus. Beginning students can get exposure to the kinds of research going on in our department. More advanced students can practice the very important skill of expositional speaking. On that note, please attend Francesca Gandini‘s Junior Colloquium Talk on December 7 at 4 pm. And if you are an older student or post-doc who would like to give a practice Colloquium, with targeted feedback, please let me (Karen Smith) know!
