Jim Sugihara

November 14, 2019

James M. Sugihara, first Ph.D. recipient at the University of Utah and long-time faculty member in Chemistry, passed away on Nov. 12, 2019. He was 101.

Jim Sugihara, 1947

Sugihara holds an important place in the University’s history, as well as Utah’s history.

In 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Sugihara was just 24, he and his family were relocated from California to the Topaz Mountain internment camp in central Utah. The family lost their home and business.

However, Sugihara was granted a leave from Topaz Mountain to pursue an education, since he had already earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at UC-Berkeley in 1939. He enrolled at the U in 1944 and studied chemistry with professor Henry Eyring.

In 1946, Sugihara’s 84-page Ph.D. dissertation on “The Reactions of Mercaptans on Sucrose and Molasses,” included only three approval signatures: Walter D. Bonner, Lloyd E. Malm and Elton L. Quinn. (Henry Eyring had not yet started work as dean of the Graduate School by that date.)

May and Jim Sugihara, 1964

Sugihara received his doctorate degree in Chemistry in 1947. The University catalog in 1948-1949 then listed the following chemistry faculty: professors Elton Quinn, Lloyd Malm, and Henry Eyring; associate professors Vic Beard, Randall Hamm, Bill Burke, Jim Horton; and assistant professors Stuart Haynes, George Hill, Austin Wahraftig, Ransom Parlin, Bruno Zwolinski, and James Sugihara.

“Scientific progress has moved in ways that one could not expect. Research in genetics has become paramount, leading to improvements in medicine and human health that one could not imagine just 10 or 20 years ago.”

- Jim Sugihara at 100 years of age

In 1964, Sugihara moved to North Dakota State University and became dean of the College of Science and Mathematics. He was named Dean of the Graduate School and Director of Research in 1974. In 1998, he retired as Professor Emeritus.

In 2010, the James M. Sugihara Scholarship – a permanent named scholarship – was established in the Chemistry Department at the U. It provides financial support for an undergraduate who is studying chemistry and who is living on campus in the Crocker Science House located on Officers Circle in Fort Douglas.

Sugihara with scholarship winners Shwan Javdan and Elizabeth Fine

AMS Fellow

November 10, 2019

U Professor and Chair Named Fellow of American Mathematical Society

Davar Khoshnevisan, professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics, has been named a member of the 2020 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The Society recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.

“I believe my selection as a Fellow is the fourteenth induction within the Department of Mathematics at the U, so this is as much a statement about my work as it is about the terrific intellectual environment within the department. It is a big honor to be a part of our program at the U and to help advance our field. The American Mathematical Society plays a crucial role in the development of mathematics worldwide. I am proud that my colleagues and I contribute to this important endeavor.” - Davar Khoshnevisan

Khoshnevisan remembers being taught calculus by an uncle when he was very young. As part of the lesson, his uncle would weave in stories about mathematics and mathematicians—famous ones from the history of mathematics, as well as those his uncle had met in his own studies of the subject. “I knew then that mathematics would not be just a job but instead a lifelong pursuit of truth and discovery,” said Khoshnevisan. “I still try to aim for this in my research today.”

Khoshnevisan originally trained to be a researcher in mathematical statistics and probability theory. During the past 10-15 years, his work has largely been in “stochastic analysis,” an area that lies on the intersection of probability theory and function theory. Science and math historians agree that probability theory was born, probably after the 8th century, as a way to study what we now called “cryptography.” Probability theory resurfaced again when mathematicians in the 16th and 17th centuries began analyzing "games of chance."

The mathematical foundations of probability evolved much later in the early decades of the 20th century, which led to an explosion of ideas and to the introduction of new areas of intellectual activity in which “chance” plays a central role. In turn, this has opened up challenging problems in mathematics and created an entirely new paradigm of “stochastic models” that lies at the heart of many science and engineering models today. During the past decade, Khoshnevisan’s work has revolved around developing mathematical ideas and techniques that aid the rigorous analysis of complex systems in science and engineering.

Khoshnevisan received a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, in statistics in 1989. He joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year and the University of Washington for three years before moving to Utah and the U in 1993 as an assistant professor in mathematics. He has been an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a visiting member of the Mathematics Research Institute at Berkeley, as well as the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a Simons Visiting Professor at the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach in Germany and an invited professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the University of Paris, and the University of Lille. He is a 2015 Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and was an IMS Medallion Lecturer in 2018.

See the original story @ math.utah.edu

Zhao Scholarship

August 22, 2019

Taylor is the first recipient of the Michael Zhao Memorial Scholarship. She’s a senior majoring in mathematics and minoring in computer science and plans to graduate in the spring of 2020.

“The financial assistance provided by the scholarship will be of great help to me in paying for my educational expenses, and it will allow me to concentrate more of my time on studying,” said Walker. “After graduating, I plan on entering the workforce in a math related field. I hope to honor Michael’s legacy in mathematics as I continue to learn about a subject we both enjoy.”

Michael Zhao loved sushi, travel and classical music. His lifelong passion and ardent pursuit, however, was always mathematics. His fascination with math took him from the 100 Club in kindergarten to Cambridge University as a Churchill Scholar. On December 8, 2018, while at Columbia University in New York City chasing his goal of becoming a college professor, Zhao passed away due to a sudden heart attack.

But on April 18, Zhao’s zeal for math continued with the naming of the first recipient of the Michael Zhao Memorial Scholarship. Taylor Walker, a senior studying mathematics and computer science, is the first awardee.

“The scholarship aims to recognize a truly outstanding mathematics student,” said Davar Khoshnevisan, chair of the Department of Mathematics, “which is consistent with celebrating Michael’s memory.”

Zhao grew up in Salt Lake City and attended Skyline High School, where he was first chair in flute and served as captain of the debate team while also attending Canada/USA Mathcamp and taking math courses at the U. As an undergraduate at the U, Zhao received the Eccles Scholarship that supported his studies in the Honors College. Zhao was intrigued by the breadth of study the Honors College offered—a place where he could read Thomas Aquinas and David Hume, while also studying Eastern philosophy and literature from texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Daodejing.

In 2017 he was the second U student to win the prestigious Churchill Scholarship. “It’s a common perception that skill in mathematics is only due to talent, but hard work counts for much more” Zhao said. “Having mentors is also extremely helpful, and I am indebted to many faculty members, graduate students, and engineers for their guidance and encouragement.”

Many of the faculty in the U’s Math Department have fond memories of working with Zhao. In an interview in 2017, professor of mathematics Gordon Savin, who served as Michael’s honors thesis advisor, said, “Mike is one of the strongest undergraduate students we have had since I have been at the University of Utah, in more than 20 years. For someone his age, he already has an incredible level of maturity and mathematical knowledge."

He also worked with Dragan Miličić. In the same interview, Miličić said, “We often have discussions on various topics related to algebraic geometry, number theory, and representation theory. I was always impressed that talking to Mike feels more like talking with a colleague and not a student.”

Another professor who worked with Zhao was Braxton Osting, who said, “Many people remember Michael as a brilliant student, excelling under an almost impossible course load covering a large range of topics in mathematics and computer science. In spending time with Michael, I also came to know him as a genuinely kind person, generous with his time and helpful to his fellow students.”

After Zhao passed away, math department faculty and fellow Churchill Scholars approached Khoshnevisan with the idea of establishing a scholarship in Zhao’s name. Khoshnevisan got approval from Zhao’s parents. They, along with colleagues, friends and even his high school math teacher, reached out to their community for donations.

The new scholarship, partly funded by the Department of Mathematics and partly by donors, keeps Zhao’s memory alive. If you’d like to contribute to this scholarship, please make checks payable to the Michael Zhao Memorial Scholarship and send donations to the following: Tiffany Jensen Department of Mathematics 155 South 1400 East, JWB 233 Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Distinguished Research

May 10, 2019

“Since Professor Molinero joined the Department of Chemistry as Assistant Professor in 2006, she has developed a thriving research program in physical and materials chemistry, with foci on elucidating the phase behavior of water and its impact on atmospheric processes, and the design of new materials for energy and cryopreservation. Professor Molinero’s ground breaking research at the University of Utah has already resulted in over 290 presentations at conferences, universities, and research institutions all over the world (110 of them by students and postdocs of Molinero), and 95 journal articles—including three in Nature—that have gathered almost five thousand citations,” said one nominator.

“Professor Molinero’s work is a hallmark of what research and scholarship at our University should be about. In her 12 years of independent research, she has made an indelible mark in several fundamental areas of physical and computational chemistry, with implications that extend to atmospheric sciences and the design of materials for energy and catalysis. Professor Molinero is a leader in the Chemistry and Physics communities. She is the Vice-chair and Chair-elect of the Theory subdivision of the American Chemical Society, member of the nominating committee of the Division of Chemical Physics of the American Physical Society, member of the Board of Managers of the American Institute of Physics Publishing, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Chemical Physics and of The Journal of Physical Chemistry, has been on the selection committee of major awards by the American Chemical Society…”

Ming Hammond

February 27, 2018

Then: 1998 Beckman Scholars Program Award Recipient, California Institute of Technology
Now: Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Molecular & Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley

“The support of my research mentor and the Beckman Scholars Program gave me the confidence and the skills to pursue an academic and research career.”

AMBF: Prior to college, were you curious about a career in science?
Ming Chen Hammond (MH): Yes.

AMBF: What exposure did you have to knowing what research in a laboratory would be like?
MH: As a high school student, I spent a summer commuting into Baltimore city to shadow researchers in a lab at UMD Baltimore medical center that worked on studying the mu opioid receptor.

AMBF: When you heard about the Beckman Scholar opportunity, what inspired you to apply?
MH: My research advisor, Barbara Imperiali, told me about the program and encouraged me to apply.

AMBF: What was your research focused on? What were the results?
MH: For the Beckman Scholar application, I conceived of an independent project to identify the active site subunit of the enzyme, oligosaccharyl transferase, by synthesizing a peptide inhibitor carrying a biotin affinity tag and a metal-chelating sequence that Thomas Kodadek had shown could be used for site-specific crosslinking. It turned out that this project was a “chemical biology” project, before I had even heard of the field of chemical biology. As a Beckman Scholar, I carried out the chemical synthesis, the enzyme purification (from fresh pig liver delivered from a farm!), the activity assays, then the crosslinking experiments to ID the active site. We didn’t publish the results, but years later I read a paper that confirmed my results using a different method. I won the Caltech SURF (summer undergraduate research fellowship) speaking competition for my talk about this work, the chemistry department award (Arie J. Haagen-Smit Memorial award) for my research, and I received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellowship (that I accepted) and National Science Foundation graduate fellowship (that I declined). I was also featured in a Time magazine article about Caltech at the time.

2022 Update

Professor Ming Chen Hammond, PhD has been appointed to the Beckman Scholars Program Executive Committee. Professor Hammond was named a Beckman Scholar in 1998 while attending California Institute of Technology and has gone on to mentor Beckman Scholars in their own labs in addition to serving as reviewers for the program and Symposium speakers.

Ming joins current Executive Committee members Professor Nicholas Ball, PhD (Pomona College), Professor Laura Hunsicker-Wang (Trinity University), and Professor Margaret Saha (College of William and Mary).

AMBF: What was the most memorable part about working with your mentor or working in the laboratory?
MH: Again, what was unique about my research experience as a Beckman Scholar was having an independent project. When my mentor moved to MIT in the summer before my senior year, the Beckman Scholarship allowed me to spend 10 weeks in Cambridge, MA to finish my project. Moving to a new city and a new institution opened my eyes a lot, even before grad school.

AMBF: How did the experience change your thinking about science and conducting research?
MH: This experience was the first time that I had the freedom and the opportunity to conceive of and execute my own research idea. This was very empowering, and I realized that independent research was what I want to do the rest of my life, and it solidified my desire to become a professor. Also, many of the ways I run my lab is inspired by the level of organization and the camaraderie I experienced in the Imperiali lab.

AMBF: Where did you go after graduation and where are you now?
MH: I went to the Chemistry Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley. I am currently an Assistant Professor in Chemistry and Molecular & Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. I am recipient of the BWF Career Award at the Scientific Interface and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. My lab develops assays that are useful for high-throughput drug screening inside and outside of cells, and we apply these assays to understand how chemical signals affect bacterial behavior. I have published many papers and have applied for patents, several of which are licensed or under evaluation for licensing.

AMBF: Do you have any advice for undergraduates considering a research career?
MH: I have advised and mentored a lot of undergraduates, as majors advisor, teacher, and research advisor. For those in other research labs, I gently push them to talk with their professor at least once a semester. For those in my research lab, I encourage them to consider coming up with their own projects after they have learned the ropes.

AMBF: Did you meet Dr. Beckman in person, and if so, what was most memorable about meeting him?
MH: I met Dr. Beckman in person at the first Beckman Scholar Symposium.

AMBF: Any final thoughts?
MH: I just want to express my tremendous gratitude and appreciation to Dr. Beckman, his family, and the Scholars program. The support of my research mentor and the Beckman Scholars Program gave me the confidence and the skills to pursue an academic and research career.

>> Original Article Beckman Foundation Interview - 2017

2017 Churchill Scholar

February 28, 2017

Michael Zhao, a Salt Lake City native and senior in mathematics pursuing an honors degree at the U, has received the prestigious Churchill Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Zhao is one of only 15 students in the U.S. to receive this award and is the second Churchill Scholar from the U.

“It’s a common perception that skill in mathematics is only due to talent, but hard work counts for much more,” said Zhao. “Having mentors is also extremely helpful, and I am indebted to many faculty members, graduate students and engineers for their guidance and encouragement.”

Zhao was drawn to math at an early age. Through an “Art of Problem Solving” online course he was introduced to number theory. He likens this first encounter to how the Hubble Space Telescope revealed thousands of ancient galaxies in what appeared to be a small, blank patch of the night sky.

In high school, he attended the Canada/USA Mathcamp and took math courses at the U. Upon graduating he was awarded a fouryear Eccles Scholarship – supported by the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation–to continue his studies at the U.

In his freshman year at the U, Zhao took a yearlong reading course exploring algebraic number theory with Gordan Savin, a professor in mathematics. He continued his studies by taking reading courses with

Dragan Milicic, a professor in mathematics, and graduate courses in algebraic geometry, number theory, and representation theory. “We often have discussions on various topics related to these courses. I was always impressed that talking to Mike feels more like talking with a colleague and not a student,” said Milicic.

Zhao has also done research in computer science. In the summer of 2015, he participated in the Research in Industrial Projects for Students Program held on the campus of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His project used computer vision techniques to create a logo recognition application for Android phones. In spring 2016, he was awarded the prestigious Barry Goldwater scholarship for excellence in STEM research.

This past summer, Zhao was an intern at Google. He developed a software-testing framework that allowed engineers to select exactly the servers they needed to handle login action in their software tests, thereby reducing computer memory usage and server startup times. “He is on a path to becoming a very powerful figure in whatever industry he chooses,” said Tyler Sellmayer, Zhao’s supervisor at Google. “His superpower is the ability to hold an enormous abstract structure in his head, and to speak intelligently about any aspect of it at any time.”

Currently, Zhao is working on his Honor’s thesis in number theory. His thesis advisor, Gordan Savin, says of Zhao: “Mike is one of the strongest undergraduate students we have had since I have been at the University of Utah, more than 20 years. For someone his age, he already has an incredible level of maturity and mathematical knowledge.”

Zhao will use the Churchill Scholarship to pursue a Master of Advanced Study in Pure Mathematics at Cambridge starting in the fall. Upon completion, Zhao plans to come back to the U.S. to complete his doctorate in mathematics focusing on number theory. “It wasn’t easy to choose in what area I wanted to specialize, even within computer science and mathematics, since they were all very exciting. Only by trying many different things – an internship, several research projects – was I able to make a decision,” said Zhao. Zhao aspires to become a professor, and hopes to make contributions to pure mathematics through research and teaching.

“Many times, pure mathematics research found its way to important applications, such as cryptography, relativity and GPS. From a different perspective, I believe research is important since it enriches society just as much as art, literature or philosophy,” said Zhao.

The Churchill Scholarship, established in 1963 at the request of Winston Churchill, provides undergraduates with outstanding academic achievement in the science, technology, engineering and math fields the opportunity to complete a one-year master’s program at the University of Cambridge. The Churchill Scholarship has been called “the most academically challenging of the U.K. scholarships.”

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