Mathematics Faculty Member Selected for Sloan Fellowship
Thomas Koberda, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, is one of 126 scientists and scholars in the United States and Canada who were selected this month to receive 2017 Sloan Research Fellowships.
Awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, these prestigious fellowships recognize early-career scientists and scholars who represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals, 69 National Medals of Science, 16 John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.
Koberda’s research focuses on geometric group theory. In the last several decades, mathematicians have studied groups as geometric objects, and Koberda’s research focuses on geometric aspects of groups, with applications to low-dimensional topology and dynamical systems. He is the second faculty member in the Department of Mathematics to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship in the last three years. Benjamin Webster, an expert in algebraic geometry, representation theory and topology, was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2014.
The Sloan Foundation award will enable Koberda to travel to research collaborators' institutions, as well as to invite his collaborators to UVA. He also plans to organize a research conference on Grounds.