UBC Mathematics: Recent Award Winners

Faculty and students in the UBC Mathematics Department have recently received a number of honours.

Academic awards:

Michael Bennett has won the Ribenboim Prize of the Canadian Number Theory Association.
Ben Green, a post-doctoral visitor from Trinity College, Cambridge, has won the 2004 Clay Research Award for his work on arithmetic progressions of prime numbers.
Alexander Holroyd is the co-winner with Itai Benjamini of the Weizmann Institute Rehovot of the 2004 Rollo Davidson Prize. This prize is awarded annually by Cambridge University to an outstanding young probabilist. Alexander was cited for novel contributions to different areas of probability including percolation in its many forms.
Izabella Laba is the winner of the Canadian Mathematical Society's Coxeter-James Prize for 2003. This award recognizes outstanding young mathematicians who are either Canadian or work in Canada. The citation refers to her work on the Kakeya conjecture on Hausdorff and Minkowski dimension of Besicovitch sets with Nets Katz and Terence Tao, which surmounts a natural barrier to improving earlier lower bounds by Thomas Wolff and Jean Bourgain. Her current work with Michael T. Lacey deals with questions in combinatorial number theory and measure theory, constructing, with Michael T. Lacey, "large" sets of integers without k-progression.

Gordon Slade is the co-winner of the Prix de L'Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP) 2003 with Remco van der Hofstad of the Stieltjes Institute for Mathematics, Delft University, for the paper

	Convergence of Critical Oriented Percolation to
	Super-Brownian Motion Above 4 + 1 Dimensions
		Remco van der Hofstad and Gordon Slade
		Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré (B) Probabilités et Statistiques,
		Volume 39, Issue 3.

Stephanie van Willigenburg won an Early Career Progress Award from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

NSERC Strategic Grants:

James Feng, Ian Frigaard and Mark Martinez (Chemical Engineering) have been awarded a NSERC strategic grant to research smart spacers for extended reach horizontal well cementing.
Philip Loewen, Guy Dumont (ECE), Michael Davies (ECE) have been awarded a NSERC strategic grant to research autonomous cross-directional systems.

Honorary degree:

Nassif Ghoussoub was awarded a "Doctorat Honoris Causa" from the University of Paris, June, 2004. This is in recognition of Nassif's research accomplishments in mathematics and for his many contributions to the discipline worldwide, through his role in the founding of PIMS, MITACS and BIRS.

Teaching awards:

Joel Feldman won the 2003-2004 Faculty of Science Achievement Award for Teaching.
Michael Ward won the 2003-2004 Faculty Killam Award for excellence in teaching.

Student awards:

Adriana Dawes was a recent co-winner of the joint CMS/CAIMS poster award. Details are posted on the webpage of the CMS/CAIMS Summer 2004 Meeting.
Liam Watson was one of ten winner's of the U.B.C. Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.

Service awards:

James Carrell has won the Faculty of Science Achievement Award for dedicated service to the Mathematics Department and the Canadian mathematical community.
Mary-Margaret Daisley has won the Faculty of Science Achievement Award for dedicated service to the faculty, staff and students of the UBC Mathematics Department.