Dr. Malempati M. Rao joined the faculty at the University of California, Riverside in 1972. He remained at UC Riverside until his retirement in 2011. He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Indian Statistical Institute, University of Vienna, University of Strasbourg, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley). Dr. Rao’s research interests were initially in probability and mathematical statistics, but his intense mathematical interest and natural curiosity found him pursuing a wide range of mathematical analysis including stochastic processes, functional analysis, ergodic theory and related asymptotics, differential equations and difference equations. Dr. Rao and his family established this fund to provide support for graduate students in the Department of Mathematics.

Students must meet all of the following criteria:

• They are specializing in the Probability or Functional Analysis within the Department of Mathematics
• They are in good academic standing

2023 - 2024 M.M. Rao Award Recipient

The 2023-24 M.M. Rao Award Graduate Fellowship Award winner is Rahul Rajkumar. Rahul is pursuing probability theory as his research area, under the direction of Prof. David Weisbart. Rahul already has results on the component processes of diffusion processes in a finite dimensional vector space over the p-adic numbers and on scaling limits. Rahul is quite independently studying what the path measures of Brownian motion can reveal about the underlying state space. In addition to his research, Rahul is active in student mentorship, and is introducing our undergraduate students to valuable research opportunities.

2022 - 2023 M.M. Rao Award Recipient

The 2022-23 M.M. Rao Award Graduate Fellowship Award winner is Chang Sun. Chang is a fourth year graduate student who works in Dynamical Systems and Spectral Theory. Currently, she is working on a project regarding M(2,C)-sequences that admit dominated splitting.