faculty-news | College of Science

Royal Fellow

August 9, 2019

Christopher Hacon, McMinn Presidential Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, can now add another honor of a lifetime to his already stellar resume: Election to The Royal Society of London.

Hacon, born in England, is one of 50 eminent scientists elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, along with 10 Foreign Members, in 2019. Founded in 1660, the Royal Society is the oldest national scientific institution in the world. Through its history, the society has named around 1,600 Fellows and Foreign Members, including around 80 Nobel laureates.

“Of course it is a great honor to be elected to the Royal Society and I am very happy and excited for the positive light it sheds on my research and my department,” Hacon said.

“Over the course of the Royal Society’s vast history, it is our fellowship that has remained a constant thread and the substance from which our purpose has been realized: to use science for the benefit of humanity,” said Royal Society president Venkatraman Ramakrishnan in a release. “It is with great honor that I welcome them as Fellows of the Royal Society.”

“Christopher Hacon,” according to the Royal Society’s biography page, “is a mathematician who specializes in the field of algebraic geometry which, loosely speaking, is a branch of mathematics that studies the geometric properties of sets defined by polynomial equations. Together with his co-authors, Hacon has proved many foundational results on the geometry of higher dimensional algebraic varieties including the celebrated result on the finite generation of canonical rings.” Because algebraic geometry is closely connected to other fields within and beyond mathematics, Hacon’s work has had broad impact.

He has been honored with prestigious awards such as the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, the 2016 EH Moore Research Article Prize, the 2015 Distinguished Scholarly and Creative Research Award from the University of Utah, the 2011 Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in Mathematics Mechanics and Applications, the 2009 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra and the 2007 Clay Research Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and holds the U’s McMinn Presidential Chair in Mathematics.

Hacon and other newly elected fellows will be formally admitted to the society in July, when they will sign the Charter Book and the Obligation of the Fellows of the Royal Society.

Other U connections in the Royal Society

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is the current president of the Royal Society of London (elected as a fellow in 2003). He is a 2009 Nobel laureate and taught at the University of Utah from 1995 to 1999.

Simon Tavaré is the director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. He taught at the University of Utah from 1978 to 1981 and from 1984 to 1989. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011.

Philip Maini is the director of the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Oxford. He taught at the University of Utah from 1988 to 1990. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015.

John Knox was a leader in the field of gas chromatography and began working with liquid chromatography after a sabbatical fellowship at the University of Utah in 1964. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984. He died in 2018.

> UNEWS - 2019 - Paul Gabrielsen

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…”

Associate V.P. for Research

April 3, 2019

The College of Science is pleased to announce the appointment of Diane Pataki, Ph.D., as the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Utah, effective April 1st, 2019. She will continue to serve as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Science through July 1st, 2019.

Dr. Pataki is a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the university. Prior to arriving in Utah in 2012, Dr. Pataki received a B.A. in environmental science at Barnard College and an M.S. and Ph.D.at the Duke University Nicholas School of Environment.

Dr. Pataki’s research work is transdisciplinary and has spanned the impacts of climate change on ecosystems, coupled human-natural processes related to urban CO2 emissions, and the role of urban landscaping and forestry in the socioecology of cities. Her lab currently studies human-environment interactions related to urban biodiversity, resource use, & landscape design, and continues to collaborate with social scientists, urban planners, landscape architects, engineers, and local stakeholders to understand the ecological and social consequences of urban landscape change.

In addition to her research, Dr. Pataki served as a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine for 8 years where she was the founding Director of the Center for Environmental Biology and the Steele Burnand Anza Borrego Desert Research Center. She has also served as a Program Director in the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology and a member of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Board of Scientific Counselors.

Dr. Pataki is looking forward to leading efforts across our campus to coordinate and enhance support for research proposal submissions, grantsmanship, and grants management. She will succeed Cynthia Furse, Ph.D., as the new Associate Vice President for Research. Dr. Furse will be transitioning back to full-time teaching and research on July 1st, 2019.

Please join us in thanking Dr. Furse for her exceptional service, and in welcoming Dr. Pataki in her new position.

AMS Fellow

November 5, 2018

“It’s such an honor to be selected to join the American Mathematical Society,” said de Fernex, professor and associate chair of the department. “It’s also gratifying to have my work recognized by my peers for contributing to the profession.”

As a child and throughout his school days, de Fernex always enjoyed math. At the University of Milan, he studied math in the morning and worked as an illustrator at an advertising agency in the afternoon. For a time, he gave up studying math and switched to architecture. “It was while studying architecture that I began to realize my true passion for math,” said de Fernex. “I was on a train to Venice with some friends when it hit me. They were majoring in math and telling me about the things they were learning. In that moment I realized how much I missed it.” He left architecture and advertising and began to see himself as a mathematician.

He completed his undergraduate degree and wrote a dissertation in the field of algebraic geometry. “What I like about algebraic geometry is the balance between intuition and mathematical rigor,” said de Fernex. “The algebraic part of it provides a powerful and rigid structure, which, paradoxically, gives geometry its flexibility.” Algebraic geometry has applications in many fields—for example, certain topics, such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, are important in string theory because they meet the supersymmetry requirement for the six “unseen” spatial dimensions of string theory.

He began working on his Ph.D. at the University of Genoa but later moved to the U.S. to complete his studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The importance of his work was recognized early on, and his research has been well-funded throughout his career. He has received various fellowships as well as support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation. “The funding I received from the U’s John E. and Marva M. Warnock Presidential Chair in Mathematics and the NSF Career grant were especially helpful,” said de Fernex. “They funded my research and provided support for grad students and postdocs. The years supported by the NSF at the Institute for Advanced Study and later by the Simons Fellowship in my sabbatical year allowed me to fully focus on research and collaboration for extended periods of time.”

While de Fernex enjoys doing research, he is equally enthusiastic about teaching. “You never know where or when you’ll find talented students,” he said. “That’s what keeps teaching exciting and fulfilling.”

AMS Fellow

November 5, 2018

“I was delighted to learn the news from the AMS,” said Trapa, professor and former chair of the Mathematics Department and currently chair of the Physics & Astronomy Department. “I’m grateful to be recognized in this way.”

Trapa has always been fascinated by mathematics, but his interests drifted as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, first to chemistry, then to physics, before finally returning to mathematics. “I realized that the common thread that I enjoyed most about the basic sciences was the underlying math.” Trapa also credits two a couple of math professors—Michael Stein, emeritus professor, and the late Mark Pinsky—who took him under their wing and “really changed the trajectory of my career.”

After a brief stint doing statistical analysis for the Ford Motor Company, Trapa headed to MIT for his Ph.D. “My time at Ford was a lot of fun, but not for the reasons that my bosses would have liked,” Trapa said, adding that the company had a decent mathematics library where he spent most of his time. At MIT, Trapa studied representation theory with David Vogan, Norbert Wiener Professor of Mathematics. Vogan later became a close friend and collaborator. “Working with David has been one of the great honors of my life. I’m constantly learning from him how to be a better mathematician.”

Trapa held postdoctoral appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at Harvard before joining the faculty at the U in 2001. His most important contributions involve classifying the kinds of symmetry that can appear in physical and mathematical problems, so-called unitary representations of reductive Lie groups. “In the past few years, there have been some beautiful and unexpected developments in the subject that lead in many new directions,” Trapa said. His work in this area has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, and the Simons Foundation. Since 2015, Trapa has served as managing editor for the AMS journal Representation Theory.

Outside of his research, Trapa enjoys working with talented students of mathematics. He helped found the Utah Math Circle for high school students, served as its director for many years, and still lectures regularly in it. “The kind of math that students learn in school is often very different from the experience of actually doing mathematics,” Trapa said. “I think it’s important to give young kids a taste of what mathematics is all about.”

Breakthrough Prize

August 9, 2018

Christopher Hacon, distinguished professor of mathematics at the U, has been interested in math for as long as he can remember. As a child, he loved playing with numbers and would spend hours on a calculator trying to count and figure out things—such as how much all the books in his house cost, or the number of seconds in a year or a lifetime. He particularly enjoyed figuring out patterns and seeing the relationships among numbers.

When he got to college, Hacon thought he would study physics and engineering, but when he was accepted into a prestigious math program, he ran with it and never looked back.

Awards and Recognition

Today Hacon has carved out a career as one of the world’s top mathematicians and has been recognized with numerous awards for teaching and research. In December 2017, he was awarded a 2018 Breakthrough Prize in mathematics at a star-studded event in Silicon Valley. The $3M Breakthrough Prize recognizes achievements in fundamental physics, life sciences, and mathematics and is one of the most generous prizes given in science. Hacon shares the award with his collaborator and colleague, James McKernan, professor of mathematics at the University of California San Diego.

In 2018, Hacon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2019, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He was recently named the first recipient of the McMinn Presidential Endowed Chair in Mathematics at the U.

Hacon’s research is in algebraic geometry, the field that studies geometric objects defined by polynomial equations. Algebraic geometry connects and elevates algebra, which solves polynomial equations, and geometry, which describes the shapes that arise from those equations.

“I am extremely honored and humbled to receive the Breakthrough Prize and to be awarded the McMinn Chair,” said Hacon. “The work I've done and am doing is the culmination of sustained efforts by many brilliant mathematicians. It is very exciting that the field of birational algebraic geometry and the University of Utah are receiving this kind of recognition.”

Early Life in Italy

Hacon was born in England but moved with his parents to Italy when he was three. His father was a mathematician, too, and served as a postdoctoral scholar in the math department at the University of Pisa. Hacon graduated from the same university and then moved to the United States at age 23 to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles.

“Italy was a great place to grow up, and I visit when I can,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s never as often as I’d like.”

He arrived at the U as a postdoctoral scholar in 1998 and returned as a professor in 2002.

“One of the things I love about math is that it allows me to find patterns and explain the reasons behind a certain behavior,” said Hacon. “This is really the essence of scientific discovery. All of these patterns are described by numbers. I’m fascinated by them, regardless of their origin. I’m constantly surprised by the power of math and abstract thought in general. It is truly amazing to read a mathematical proof dating back decades or centuries, which is still correct and interesting—both today and in the future.”

Mentors and Teaching

Hacon credits his mentors with providing inspiration and helping him move forward in his career. “While I have been inspired by many people, I have four mentors who have really made a difference in my life. They are Fabrizio Catanese and Fabio Bardelli at the University of Pisa, Robert Lazarsfeld at UCLA, and János Kollár, my postdoctoral advisor at the University of Utah, who now teaches at Princeton.”

Hacon enjoys teaching students at the U and finds the Department of Mathematics is a good place to work. He and his wife, Aleksandra Jovanovic-Hacon, who is a math instructor at the U, are busy raising their six children. They like the outdoors, especially rock climbing, hiking, and skiing.

“Working as a mathematician has been great,” said Hacon. “The academic freedom to pursue my own research goals is one of the biggest rewards I have, as well as working with students and other researchers.”

Hacon hopes to continue his research, while inspiring the next generation of mathematicians. He would love to see his students surpass his efforts and continue to make strides in further exploring and expanding our understanding of algebraic geometry.