Professor Ralf Schiffler has been awarded a Simons Visiting Professorship by the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in Germany. This program annually supports up to 40 Simons Visiting Professors, distinguished scientists from outside of Europe, who wish to combine an existing invitation to an Oberwolfach Workshop with a research visit to a European university of up to two weeks.

Professor Schiffler will use this award to work on several existing research projects as well as create new research collaborations during a two week visit to Germany. He will stay at the University Bielefeld and participate in the workshop Representation Theory of Quivers and Finite Dimensional Algebras in Oberwolfach.

This year’s awards ceremony took place on April 21 in IMS 20. The invited address was by Dr. Charles Haddock

Amit Savkar, Associate Professor in Residence, has been named a Teaching Fellow by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL).

The nominees for this award are limited to full-time faculty with 5 years continuous service at the University. The individuals considered for this recognition show a commitment to teaching, demonstrated knowledge of educational pedagogy, and an interest in fostering innovative teaching practices at the University.

This year, up to two Teaching Fellows will be honored and each will be awarded a stipend of $5,000.

Separately, Marianne Cavanaugh has been awarded this year’s CETL Outstanding Adjunct.

The nominees for this award are limited to adjunct faculty with teaching service to the University. The individuals considered for this recognition show a commitment to teaching, demonstrated knowledge of educational pedagogy, and an interest in fostering innovative teaching practices at the University.

It is intended that up to two such Outstanding Adjuncts will be honored and each awarded a stipend of $2,500.

The awards were presented at the CETL Reception on April 26.

Professors [dump script=”PersonLink.php?LastName=Gan&FirstName= Guojun”] and [dump script=”PersonLink.php?LastName=Valdez&FirstName=Emiliano”] have been awarded a one-year grant from the Society of Actuaries to support their project “Regression Modeling for the Valuation of Large Variable Annuity (VA) Portfolios” starting in 2016. They will investigate the potential use of GB2 (generalized beta of the second kind) distributions with four parameters to model the fair market values of VA guarantees. The findings from this project can help insurance companies to reduce significantly the processing time of the Monte Carlo simulation model commonly used in practice for VA valuation.

Professor Maria Gordina has been awarded the prestigious Simons Fellowship, one of only forty mathematicians in North America to receive the award this year. The Fellowship enables research leaves by providing time away from classroom teaching and academic administration. Professor Gordina will use the award to work on several projects while visiting her collaborators in the US and in Europe. In particular, she will combine a stay at Bielefeld University in Germany with a trip to the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics to attend the workshop Heat Kernels, Stochastic Processes and Functional Inequalities, of which she is a co-organizer. Professor Gordina’s projects during 2015-2016 will include work on on singular stochastic differential equations and structure theory of the energy representation of path groups with values in compact groups.

For more information, see the article about Professor Gordina in UConn Today.

Drew Jaramillo and Maree Jaramillo, Visiting Assistant Professors of Mathematics, are among the winners of the 2015 Provost’s Teaching Innovation Mini Grant Competition. This new grant competition was open to faculty of all ranks, across all UConn campuses. This grant competition was designed to provide support for faculty innovation in teaching effectiveness and improved student learning outcomes. More than 90 mini-grant proposals were submitted—26 proposals representing 21 different departments were funded. Drew Jaramillo won for his project “Evaluation of course hybridization in mathematics”, while Maree Jaramillo won for her project “Flipping an upper level mathematics course to increase student engagement”. More information, along with a list of all of this year’s winners, is available from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.