Sophie Spirkl, an assistant professor of Combinatorics and Optimization, has received a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Spirkl is one of 125 early career researchers in the United States and Canada who received a Fellowship this year.
Laura Bumbulis, an undergraduate student in combinatorics and optimization, hadn’t completed much science-related work since taking grade 11 biology.
That changed in 2021 as Bumbulis played a key role in improving efficiency at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) during her co-op work term.
July 28 was the date of the first presentation of the new: "Optimization: Theory, Algorithms, Applications Lecture Series" organized by The Fields Institute and the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization.
“While working as an instructional support assistant (ISA), I remember the first time a professor asked for a volunteer to teach a lecture while he was at a conference,” remembers Josué Kurke. “My hand shot up. I donned a professorial kind of jacket with the elbow patches and went all out. Over time, I’ve realized that I feel most at home in front of a classroom. I want to spend my career talking to people about math.”
This award recognizes the impact of Stefan's paper, Maximum determinant positive definite Toeplitz completions, with a prize of $4,000.