Assistant Professor Joaquin Moraga joins the Department

Joaquin Moraga will be joining the department as an assistant professor in July 2022.

He earned his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Utah in Summer 2019. During his PhD at the University of Utah, under the advice of Chirstopher Hacon, his research focused on the minimal model program. After finishing his PhD, Moraga started a position as an instructor in Mathematics at Princeton University in Fall 2019. During his time at Princeton, he worked alongside other co-authors to prove new results regarding singularities: their topology, quotients, and other invariants.

Some of his other work has revolved around running various seminars, such as a Learning Seminar on the Minimal Model Program, which started in 2021. He also organized the Princeton Algebraic Geometry Seminar together with Chenyang Xu and the Princeton Algebraic Geometry Preprint Seminar together with Fernando Figueroa. At UCLA, Moraga plans to organize and participate in seminars about Algebraic Geometry and related topics

To learn more about Joaquin Moraga and his research, please click here.

UCLA Computer Science Professor Amit Sahai to join the Department

UCLA Computer Science Professor Amit Sahai will begin a new joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science this Fall.

Amit Sahai is a Simons Investigator (2021), Fellow of the ACM (2018) and a Fellow of the IACR (2019). He was an invited lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2022 (ICM 2022). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2021), and Advisor to the Prison Mathematics Project. 

His work has been featured in numerous publications, such as the Quanta Magazine. Using a mathematical framework, Sahai and his collaborators developed an “indistinguishability” obfuscator that may have possess the power to advance cryptography in a new direction. “Modern cryptography is about the transition from private to public,” Sahai said. “Obfuscation gives you a remarkable ability to move between these two worlds that, for decades, we thought of as fundamentally different.” Read more about his feature here.

To learn more about his research and accomplishments, visit his website here.