Three Krieger School professors have been awarded prestigious fellowships from the Simons Foundation, whose mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. The fellowship provides scholars with the support to extend their academic leaves from one term to a full year, enabling them to focus solely on research for the long periods often necessary for significant advances.
Julian Krolik, a professor of physics and astronomy, has been awarded a highly competitive Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. Krolik conducts research in active galactic nuclei, black holes, and high-energy astrophysics.
Krolik will spend substantial time at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studying what happens when the tidal gravity of supermassive black holes disrupts stars that venture too close. At the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, he will begin a project on how pairs of supermassive black holes interact with the galaxy hosting them. He also will do research at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he will expand a long-standing effort to predict what kind of light is made by gas around supermassive binary black holes as they approach merger.
Yannick Sire and Christopher Sogge have been awarded Simons Fellowships in Mathematics.
Sire, a professor, will use his award for travel and to further work in progress. He will spend the 2018-19 academic year at the University of Texas at Austin, where he will work with Luis Caffarelli, a world-renowned leader in Sire's field of partial differential equations, on a project dealing mainly with nonlocal equations on nonsmooth sets. He also will hold a series of short-term visiting professorships at universities in Hong Kong, Zurich, and Shanghai. In addition, Sire hopes to complete a book about topics in geometric analysis that he has been developing with Nickolai Nadirashvili, of the French National Center for Scientific Research.
Sogge, the J.J. Sylvester of Mathematics, was awarded a Simons Fellowship for the second time, the first being in 2012. His research interests focus around harmonic analysis, and he will use the award to advance collaborations with colleagues in China and Scotland.
Jointly founded by Jim and Marilyn Simons in New York City, the Simons Foundation supports basic-or discovery-driven-scientific research undertaken in the pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world. Its Mathematics and Physical Sciences division supports research in mathematics, theoretical physics, and theoretical computer science by providing funding for individuals, institutions, and science infrastructure.
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