Department of Mathematics

Seminars

Seminar Information

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Highlights

2025 ASA/CSSA/SSSA National Student Recognition

Maritssa Nolasco, a fourth-year Mathematics for Teachers of Secondary School major at UC Riverside, has been honored with the 2025 ASA/CSSA/SSSA National Student Recognition Award for her outstanding contributions to agricultural research and student mentorship. As part of the Digital Agriculture Fellowship (DAF), Maritssa applied her mathematics skills to cutting-edge soil research, using gamma-ray spectrometry and high-resolution satellite imagery to analyze soil variability in California’s Salinas Valley—critical for improving water and fertilizer efficiency in lettuce farming. Under the mentorship of Dr. Elia Scudiero, she not only developed strong technical expertise but also served as a peer mentor, guiding fellow students through research and presentations. With plans to pursue a teaching credential and master’s degree in math education at UCR, Maritssa continues to blend research, education, and service into a meaningful career path.

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2024 - 2025 Bryce Mason Award Winners

The Math Department proudly announces the 2025 winners of the Bryce-Mason Award. They are Xavier Madrid and Mark Sandey.

Xavier Madrid has excelled in many upper division math courses. Faculty recommendations highlighted his strong proof-writing skills, exceptional potential in mathematics, and respectful, responsible collaboration with peers both in coursework and in research settings.

Mark Sandey has an outstanding academic record, including excellent performance in several graduate level courses. Faculty recommendations highlighted their active participation in class discussions, collaborations with fellow students, and engagement in various research projects.

Congratulations Xavier and Mark!

2024 - 2025 Bosch Award Winners

The Math Department proudly announces the 2025 winners of the Bosch Award. These students stood out not only for their strong performance in advanced math courses, but also for their enthusiastic faculty support.

Madison Juliana Oliva for her great coursework, evident passion for mathematics, and impressive contributions to undergraduate research.

Jackeline Medina for her great course performance as well as her willingness to take on challenging theoretical projects and contribute to new research work.

Congratulations Madison and Jackeline!

Outstanding Visiting Assistant Professor Awards

This year the UCR Mathematics Outstanding Visiting Assistant Professor Awards go to Esther Banaian, Liping Deng and Pallav Goyal. Congratulations! To learn about their accomplishments and contributions for the 2024-2025 academic year, please visit the VAP awards page.

2024 - 2025 M.M. Rao Award Recipient - Nicholas Chiem

The 2024-25 M.M. Rao Award winner is Nicholas Chiem. Nick's research lies at the intersection of dynamical systems, spectral theory, and mathematical physics. He focuses on proving Anderson localization via positivity and large deviation estimates for the Lyapunov exponent. Now in his third year, Nick has already authored a single-author paper and is currently working on three additional projects. In his paper, he proved the uniform positivity of the Lyapunov exponent for certain potentials generated by Arnold’s cat map which is the first result of its kind for such maps and extends earlier work by others including his advisor, Professor Zhenghe Zhang. Congratulations!

National Science Foundation CAREER Award - Matthew Durham

The Mathematics Department proudly announces that Professor Matthew Durham is the winner of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award on Geometry of Mapping Class Groups and Surface Bundles.

The mathematics in this research project centers around questions in geometry and topology, which are broadly concerned with understanding various notions of shape. This project focuses on 2-dimensional spaces called surfaces, which are fundamental in many areas of mathematics. Surfaces can be flat, like a piece of paper, or curved, like the outside of a ball, a donut, or a saddle, and the various shapes they take often strongly constrain the shapes of the higher dimensional spaces in which they live. The educational portion of this project involves a variety of activities aimed at recruiting and supporting marginalized students into mathematics. The first part continues a series of workshops featuring mini-courses by early career speakers from underrepresented groups on their cutting-edge research aimed at graduate students. The second part establishes a series of undergraduate research and recruitment events connecting undergraduate mathematics researchers in Southern California with graduate recruiters from programs in the region. The third part is a Topical Pedagogy Seminar which will provide graduate students and postdocs training in incorporating topical material into foundational mathematics courses.

A remarkable and ubiquitous example of this mathematical phenomenon is a surface bundle, which just like a donut, can be sliced so that the cross-sections are surfaces. Unlike a donut, however, as one moves through most surface bundles, the surface cross-sections can twist and deform in complicated ways. This twisting?which essentially determines the bundle?is encoded in the mapping class group, which, among other things, is the collection of all symmetries of the space of shapes that a surface can take, also known as Teichmüller space. The first part of the research program aims to develop a powerful fleet of combinatorial techniques for studying the geometry of mapping class groups and Teichmüller spaces, as well as their structure at infinity. The second part focuses on the geometry of surface bundles arising naturally from dynamics.

In more detail, this project will investigate the coarse geometry of the mapping class group, Teichmüller space, and surface bundles using the tools of geometric group theory. The first part aims to address a family of results showing that mapping class groups can be coherently locally modeled by CAT(0) cube complexes, allowing for the construction of new metrics with a variety of applications, including about their geometry and topology at infinity. The second part studies the geometry of surface bundles of Veech surfaces and their combinations, as well as developing a Sullivan-like notion of structural stability for the subgroups associated to a variety of surface bundles with nice curvature properties.

Distinguished Teaching Award 2024/25

The Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) is a highly competitive and distinctive award recognizing a graduate student's teaching excellence. It is awarded to only a few graduate students annually. For 2025 the Graduate Division awarded only three Distinguished Teaching Awards: two in STEM and one in Humanities. Based upon a careful review of nomination letters submitted by faculty, students, and peers and teaching evaluations, the DTA Selection Committee determined that a Mathematics Graduate Student demonstrated consistently superior classroom performance as a teaching assistant and selected...

Shane Rankin as a recipient of the 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award !!!

Please join us in congratulating him on this achievement!

Outstanding Teaching Assistants 2024/25
 

Thank you to everyone who submitted nominations for the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for 2024-25! The OTA Award is based on a TA's consistent superior teaching performance.

Please join me in congratulating our Outstanding Teaching Assistants (OTA) for 2024-25

14th Annual Southern California Systems Biology Symposium (SoCal SysBio 2025)
 

Join us for the 14^th Annual Southern California Systems Biology Symposium (SoCal SysBio 2025), a premier event bringing together researchers from across Southern California to share cutting-edge research, foster community, and stimulate collaborations. This event will provide an opportunity for research groups from academic campuses and hospitals across Southern California to present their latest findings and promote collaborations in all areas of Systems and Computational Biology involving data-driven computational and machine learning modeling. 

This symposium will feature:

• Invited Talks from leading experts in systems and computational biology
• Lightning Talks for concise, impactful presentations based on posters
• Poster Session showcasing the work of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers

Registration is required - please visit: https://icqmb.ucr.edu/14th-annual-southern-california-systems-biology-symposium

UCR's Grad Slam Final Competition

Grad Slam is a UC-wide public speaking competition and professional development opportunity in which graduate students describe their research or creative project in three minutes, with a maximum of one PowerPoint slide, to a non-specialist audience. Participating students are supported through public speaking workshops and feedback sessions, and progress through several preliminary and semi-final rounds. Contestants have the opportunity to win up to $5,000 at the UCR level and another $7,000 at the UC-wide level of competition.

Many congratulations to Angeliz Vargas Casillas for winning 3^rd place with with her research talk "When Math Meets Your Skin: A Multiscale Model of Keloid Scar Expansion" at the UC Grad Slam Finals!

Southern California Applied Mathematics Symposium (SOCAMS) 2025
 

We are trilled to announce our department is organizing the Southern California Applied Mathematics Symposium (SOCAMS) 2025 on April 26^th, 2025 at UC Riverside, and we are pleased to extend our warmest invitation to you to participate in the conference.

SOCAMS 2025 is a unique opportunity to connect and exchange ideas with researchers from universities throughout Southern California who work in all areas of Applied and Computational Mathematics. This one-day event is designed to provide a platform for young faculty, post-docs, and graduate students to showcase their research work in an informal and collaborative atmosphere.

This year’s plenary speakers (in alphabetical order) are (https://2025.socams.org/plenary-speakers):

1.  Mihai Cucuringu
2.  Natalia Komarova
3.  Bo Li
4.  Hrushikesh Mhaskar
5.  Maziar Raissi

Registration for all participants is required, but free thanks to generous support from SIAM, UCR Dean’s Office of College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences (CNAS), UCR Research and Economic Development (RED) and UCR Riverside Artificial Intelligence Research and Education Institute (RAISE).

You are welcome to submit an abstract for a talk or poster presentation. The registration deadline for participants with a talk or poster is April 11^th, 2025, while those without presentations can register until April 30^th, 2025. Lunch will be provided and informal networking is encouraged to facilitate collaborations and connections.

To register and access more information, please visit the SOCAMS 2025 website at https://www.socams.org/.
In particular, the registration form is at https://forms.gle/Er6oNDWxfHzpQEGg7
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at committeesocams@gmail.com.

We look very much forward to your participation and contributions to the event.

-SOCAMS Organizing Committee

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