Awards recognize department excellence At the end of each academic year, the University of Utah, the College of Science, the Department of Mathematics, and national and international organizations recognize excellence in faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, and staff through the presentation of awards. In this section of Aftermath, we highlight some of the members of our Mathematics academic community who received distinctions in the 2021-2022 academic year. For a complete list of recipients, please see the summary on pages 16 and 17.
FACULTY AWARD
Priyam Patel receives U Faculty Fellow Award Priyam Patel, Assistant Professor of mathematics, has received a Faculty Fellow Award from the University of Utah.
Faculty Fellow Awards provide a semester of full release time from teaching and administrative tasks at full salary to tenure-line faculty for scholarly and creative projects. The funding can also be used to support pilot studies for external funding proposal submissions. “Receiving this award is such an honor, and I am thankful for the time it will afford me to build on the momentum in my current research program,” said Patel. Patel studies curves on surfaces, symmetries of surfaces, and objects called hyperbolic manifolds and their finite covering spaces. Surfaces come in two types: finite or infinite. Traditionally, finite-type surfaces have been studied more extensively; however, infinite-type surfaces are the focus of a quickly growing, new subfield of geometry and topology. One of the biggest unsolved problems in mathematics is to classify the symmetries of infinite-type surfaces. Patel plans to use the award to further her research in this area.
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Priyam Patel In 2021, she received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, which is considered the most prestigious NSF award for faculty members early in their careers as researchers and educators. Patel joined the Math Department in 2019.
