Alumni News

Keith Merrrill
May 2019
Keith Merrill, PhD '13, was awarded the 2019 Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Keith is currently an Assistant Professor in the Brandeis Mathematics Department.
May 2019
John Bergdall, PhD '13, is the subject of an article on the website of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He describes his experiences as a graduate student in the Brandeis Mathematics department and subsequent postdoctoral positions.
April 2019
The Department was thrilled to host Ph.D. alumni, including Andrew Gainer-Dewar (’12), Software Engineer III at Google; Mario Bourgoin (’04), Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft; Chunsheng Chen (’99), Senior Software Engineer at Google; and Alex Charis (’12), Senior Software Engineer at HubSpot. Graduate students engaged with alumni to learn about career paths for mathematicians in software engineering and data science. Through their experiences, alumni showed students how to translate their skills into industry jobs. One alumnus summed it up, “a math Ph.D. teaches you how to wrestle a problem patiently to the ground. You are fearless when it comes to solving problems.”
March 2019
We are thrilled to announce that Karen Uhlenbeck has won the 2019 Abel Prize in Mathematics. Uhlenbeck
Fall 2017
Brandon Shapiro (BA ’17) has been awarded a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship starting in 2017, to support his PhD studies in Mathematics at Cornell University.
May 2017
Nick Wadleigh (PhD’17 with Professor Dmitry Kleinbock) and Matthew Cordes (PhD’16 with Professor Ruth Charney) have each been awarded Zuckerman STEM Leadership Postdoctoral Scholarships. Each will be a postdoc at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
May 2017
János Kollár (PhD’84 in Mathematics with Professor Teruhisa Matsusaka) is a co-recipient (with Claire Voisin) of the 2017 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. Awarded by the Hong Kong-based Shaw Foundation, the Shaw Prize honors recent breakthroughs by researchers in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, and life science and medicine.
May, 2017
Leslie Lamport (MA’63, PhD’72 with Professor Richard Palais) was given an honorary degree at the 2017 Brandeis Commencement, and gave an address at the School of Science diploma ceremony. Lamport was the recipient of the 2013 A.M. Turing Award, given by the Association for Computing Machinery.
August 2016
Jingyue Chen (PhD’15) was awarded a New World Mathematics Award Silver Prize at the 2016 International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians. The prize was awarded for her PhD Thesis, Existence and Rigidity of Calabi-Yau Bundles, supervised by Professor Bong Lian.