News

Department of Mathematics faculty members Rishidev Chaudhuri and Laura Starkston have both been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships for 2021. These prestigious fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. According to the Foundation, the Fellowships "seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise." Chaudhuri and Starkston are among 128 recipients of the Fellowship for 2021.

Rishidev Chaudhuri is an applied mathematician. He joined UC Davis in 2019 with a joint appointment between the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior. His research deals with themes such as noise and variability in the brain, computation via dynamics in recurrent networks, and more. He plans to use the Sloan Fellowship funding to study how noise and randomness might play a role in neural computation, and to develop techniques to extract structure from experimental recordings of the activity of populations of neurons, and attempt to apply the resulting data to test and refine theories of decision-making.

Laura Starkston joined UC Davis in 2018. She is a pure mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology. Her Sloan Fellowship work will focus on several research questions relating to symplectic 4-manifolds and singular submanifolds. In addition to the Sloan Fellowship, she is the recipient of a 2020 Hellman Fellowship and a 2021 Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation.

Congratulations Rishidev and Laura!