Professor Joaquin Moraga receives NSF CAREER Award

Professor Joaquin Moraga has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. He will be receiving $500,000 over the course of five years to supplement his research regarding algebraic geometry. 

This program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Moraga’s project aims to develop new tools to understand algebraic singularities and apply these techniques to understand algebraic varieties of positive curvature. The funds will be used to further several algebraic geometry activities at UCLA and support graduate and undergraduate students in the field. 

As part of this project, two summer research schools in birational geometry will be hosted at UCLA. 

Moraga, together with other experts in the field, will train the new generation of mathematicians in birational geometry.  

Read this official announcement here. 

Learn more about the NSF CAREER program here.

Professors Anton Bernshteyn and Ernest Ryu named 2025 Sloan Research Fellows

Prof. Anton Bernshteyn (left) and Prof. Ernest Ryu (right)

UCLA Math Professors Anton Bernshteyn and Ernest Ryu have been awarded the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship. Bernshteyn and Ryu are two of the six UCLA professors selected among 126 scientists and scholars for this prestigious honor, ranking UCLA No. 1 among public colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada in the number of new honorees.

The Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers in chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Fellows receive a two-year, $75,000 award to support their research from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which was established in 1934.

“Bernshteyn specializes in descriptive set theory (a branch of mathematical logic) and combinatorics, focusing on their interactions and connections to other fields, such as computer science and dynamical systems. Through his research, he aims to develop versatile tools that yield explicit, constructive solutions to combinatorial problems across various mathematical disciplines. In particular, he explores how techniques from distributed computing— the area of computer science concerned with decentralized networks — can be applied in descriptive set theory and beyond. Bernshteyn is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award.”

“Ryu is an applied mathematician working in the areas of optimization and machine learning. His research analyzes the family of acceleration mechanisms — of which the most commonly known are momentum-based techniques in machine learning optimizers — with the ambitious goal of formulating a grand unified theory of acceleration. Ryu is the recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society Young Researchers Prize.”

Read the full UCLA Newsroom article here.

Professor Mason Porter Receives 2025 George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition

UCLA Math Professor Mason Porter has been named the recipient of the 2025 George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition, a prestigious honor from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). This prize recognizes his outstanding exposition of the mathematical sciences to audiences at all levels and interests, including review articles in networks, complex systems, and dynamics.

The purview of the prize is the following: “The George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition, established in 2013, is awarded every two years to an outstanding expositor of the mathematical sciences. The prize may be awarded for a specific work or for the cumulative impact of multiple expository works that communicate mathematics effectively. Following Pólya’s example, the nature of the work may range from popular accounts of mathematics and mathematical discovery to pedagogy to systematic organization of mathematical knowledge.”

Porter will be honored at the Third Joint SIAM/CAIMS Annual Meetings (AN25), scheduled for July 28th to August 1st, 2025 in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Learn more about the prize here.

Read the SIAM announcement here.

Read the UCLA Newsroom article here.