UCLA Math PhD Alumna ‘23 Abigail Hickok has received two distinguished awards for her dissertation work, under the supervision of Professor Mason Porter. She is the inaugural recipient of the 2024 Ivo and Renata Babuška Thesis Prize through the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and a 2024 awardee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) Dissertation Prize.
Dr. Hickok was awarded the inaugural Ivo and Renata Babuška Thesis Prize in recognition of her exemplary PhD thesis, “Topics in Geometric and Topological Data Analysis.” The prize will be presented at the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. The Babuška Thesis Prize is awarded annually, starting with this inaugural prize, “to the author of an outstanding PhD thesis in mathematics, interdisciplinary in nature, possibly with applications to other fields.”
The AWM Dissertation Prize is an annual award given to outstanding PhD dissertations presented and defended by female mathematical scientists during the 24 months preceding the award committee review. Hickok is one of the two recipients for 2024.
The short version of the Babuška Thesis Prize prize citation reads: “‘Dr. Hickok was a mathematics undergraduate with pure inclinations in the class of 2018 at Princeton, and as a graduate student at UCLA, she turned to more applied areas. This breadth of background has contributed to a thesis that is at once strongly founded theoretically, deeply involved in applications, and beautifully written.’”
Dr. Hickok is currently a NSF postdoc fellow at Columbia University. Learn more about her work here.
Read the full press release for the inaugural 2024 Ivo and Renata Babuška Thesis Prize here.
Read more about the AWM Dissertation Prize here.
