The Department of Mathematics is hiring a bumper crop of new faculty members for the 2025-26 academic year. Two of them are profiled here: Uri Shapira and David Schwein.

Knowing your audience: Uri Shapira

“When wearing the teacher’s hat and not the researcher’s, I believe it is my job to give service. I do not look at myself; I look at the people in class that I currently serve. It’s an attitude that says ‘Ok, let’s look and see what is best for this audience.’”

This is the approach that Uri Shapira takes towards teaching his classes. He’s well aware there is no one-size-fits-all approach that students can learn from, as different students are going to learn in fundamentally different ways. As Shapira describes, a biologist doesn’t need to understand the history of a formula or how it was developed. They just need to know how to use it as a tool. So give them the tool, teach them how it works and where to apply it. 

But a math major would benefit from that history, understanding what the original problem was and how a new tool was created to solve it. And by understanding that process —how such discoveries came to be — students will  be better suited to make their own breakthroughs in the future.

It’s a refreshing and realistic approach to teaching, inspired by a lifetime of exposure to mathematics. Introduced to the subject by his older brother, Shapira would go on to graduate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem then spend his postdoc at ETH Zurich, which paved the way for a faculty position at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He brings over a decade of teaching experience, paired with research into how questions in number theory can be approached with the tools of dynamical systems. 

Be it the researcher or the teacher, Uri Shapira fully devotes himself to playing whichever role is before him. After a lifetime of being inspired by mentors and colleagues, he looks forward to contributing to the U’s math community in kind, to learn, to research and to provide the invaluable service of teaching.

Community and Utility: David Schwein

We’ve all heard the stereotypes about math: That it’s a study exclusively for prodigies, that it’s an isolated career. And then there is the classic complaint of “When am I going to use this?” 

But in reality, such complex studies need communication and communities to work alongside them. As for utility, the problem-solving skills math develops are incredibly useful to any walk of life. 

These are the kind of ideals David Schwein hopes to impart to his students.

An assistant professor at the University of Utah, Schwein is fresh off a postdoctoral research journey across Europe, starting at Cambridge and ending at the University of Bonn in Germany His research primarily deals with symmetry, using the Langlands program to study connections between the representation of p-adic groups, number theory and Galois theory. Across this educational arc he’s traveled to almost 20 countries, giving him a wide range of exposure to how math is approached across the globe.

This experience is not unique in the world of math, as Schwein describes “an interesting and stimulating community in this field, all across the globe, that is all working on various aspects of a single problem”— an international network of professional puzzle solvers who can (and usually need) to work together to pursue new breakthroughs. It’s an aspect of the field that often goes unnoticed in what he calls the stupor of complicated lectures, which Schwein hopes to avoid. “You’ve got to break students out of that stupor and get them communicating about ideas, coming up with examples,” he says. “It helps if they’re a little skeptical, questioning how something can be true. I’m looking forward to helping students see the beauty and structure of math, how it’s another science that tells us about the real world.”

With experience teaching both introductory and high-level courses in multiple cultures, Schwein is well equipped to start teaching number theory and complex analysis in the fall. Having grown up in Denver, Colorado, he’s happy to return to his roots in the Rocky Mountains and is eager to explore the beautiful natural environments Utah has to offer. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) marked its 75^th anniversary May 10 2025 and to celebrate, computational mathematicians gathered at the University of Utah May 8-9 for their annual meeting.

Cholera kills thousands of people and infects hundreds of thousands every year—and cases have spiked in recent years, leaving governments with an urgent need to find better ways to control outbreaks.

Current public health guidelines discourage treating cholera, a severe diarrheal disease caused by waterborne bacteria, with antibiotics in all but the most severe cases, to reduce the risk that the disease will evolve resistance to the best treatments we have.

But recent disease modeling research from University of Utah Health and the Department of Mathematics challenges that paradigm, suggesting that for some cholera outbreaks, prescribing antibiotics more aggressively could slow or stop the spread of the disease and even reduce the likelihood of antibiotic resistance.

The results are based on mathematical modeling and will require further research to confirm. But they represent a first step toward understanding how antibiotics could change cholera spread. Co-authors include Cormac LaPrete, Jody Reimer and Frederick Adler from the math department's mathematical biology group.

“This might be an underused opportunity for cholera control, where expanding antibiotic treatment could have population-level benefits and help control outbreaks,” said Lindsay Keegan, research associate professor in epidemiology at U of U Health and senior author on the study published Wednesday.

Putting the brakes on outbreaks

Key to the researchers’ discovery is the fact that antibiotics make people less infectious. Medication is generally reserved for people who are most severely infected because moderate cases quickly recover with rest and rehydration. But while antibiotics may not help most individuals feel better faster, they reduce the amount of time someone is infectious by a factor of 10.

“If you recover naturally from cholera, you will feel better in a day or two, but you’re still shedding cholera for up to two weeks,” explained co-author Sharia Ahmed, assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Keegan’s lab. “But if you take an antibiotic, you still feel better in about a day, and you stop releasing cholera into your environment.”

This means that treating moderate cases with antibiotics could slow outbreaks or, in some cases, stop them in their tracks. Even though a higher percentage of people with cholera would be using antibiotics, fewer people would get the disease, so that less antibiotics are used overall.

Cumulatively, lower antibiotic use lowers the risk that cholera evolves antibiotic resistance—which is “a big concern in the field,” Keegan said. “Cholera is exceptionally good at evading antibiotics and developing resistance. It’s not just a theoretical problem.”

The researchers mathematically modeled the spread of cholera under a variety of conditions to see which cases could benefit from antibiotic use. The key variable is how likely someone is to spread the disease to other people, which in turn depends on factors like population density and sanitation infrastructure.

In cases where cholera spreads more rapidly—like in regions with higher population density or without reliable access to clean drinking water—treating moderate cases of cholera with antibiotics wouldn’t slow the spread enough to balance out the risks of antibiotic resistance.

But if spread is relatively slow, the researchers found, using antibiotics for moderate cases could limit spread enough that, in the long run, fewer people catch the disease and fewer people are treated with antibiotics. In some cases, they predict, antibiotic use could stop outbreaks entirely.

Cholera cases are on the rise

Figuring out better plans for managing cholera is especially urgent because outbreaks are on the rise. Cases and deaths have spiked by about a third in the past year, likely related to mass displacement and natural disasters. As the climate shifts and extreme weather events become more frequent, disruptions to infrastructure could lead to cholera outbreaks in countries that haven’t previously experienced the disease.

The researchers emphasize that further work is needed before their work could motivate changes to how governments treat cholera. Scientists need to see whether the results hold up in more complex simulations that incorporate factors like cholera vaccines, and they need to figure out rules of thumb to quickly estimate whether or not the disease will spread slowly enough for aggressive antibiotic use to be a good call.

“The takeaway is not, ‘OK, let’s start giving people antibiotics,’” Keegan said. “This is a first step at understanding antibiotic use as a possibility for outbreak control.”

“If the results continue to be this compelling,” Ahmed added, “and we can replicate them in different settings, I think then we start talking about changing our policy for antibiotic treatment for cholera. This is a really good example of using data to continually improve our policy and our treatment choices for even well-established diseases.”

These results were published April 30 in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology as “A theoretical framework to quantify the tradeoff between individual and population benefits of expanded antibiotic use.” Co-authors include Cormac LaPrete, Jody Reimer and Frederick Adler of the U’s Department of Mathematics and School of Biological Sciences, and Damon Toth and Valerie Vaughn of the Department of Internal Medicine. The research was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (grant numbers 1U01CK000675 and 1NU38FT000009-01-00) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (grant number 5K08HS026530-06).

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced the winners of the 2025 Sloan Research Fellows which includes Kurt Vinhage, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Utah.