News
2026 Newsletter
A message from our Department Head, Dr. John Harding:
The end of the semester is coming soon and with it some people are leaving, some moving from one status to another, and some coming in.
Our students Bayron Fajardo (Andres Contreras), Mashy Khan (Guram Bezhanishvili), Sehwan Kim (Bruce Olberding) and Vlad Sliusarev (Ilya Shapirovskiy) are about to graduate with their PhDs. Our Master’s graduates are Andrew Zerwekh (NMSU PhD), Zoey Zhou (Applied Stats Oregon St PhD), Thang Nguyen (Applied Math Stony Brook PhD), Susan Harding (CS Iowa PhD) and Kenat Calleros. Congratulations! And best of luck in the future.
Our current visitors Joel Lucero-Bryan, Hien Tran, Hamed Obeidat, and Joe Paulson are leaving us after this semester. Joining us in the fall are Jiajun Tang our new TT faculty in Stats who is coming from a postdoc at U. Pennsylvania and Sungmin Won our new College faculty from U. Kansas. We also have joining us in the fall Alex Waugh, a new postdoc in topology from Washington; and visitors Dylan Borchart (Stats NDSU), Vihn Nguyen coming from a postdoc in algebra at Arkansas, and our recent graduate Kenat Calleros. Our recent postdoc in algebra, Arvind Kumar, is returning for another year.
In terms of hiring, despite losing 3 TT faculty in the last year, Robert Smits, Ernie Barney, and Tony Wang, and replacing one with Jiajun Tang, we were only granted permission to seek one TT faculty in stats and an additional CT faculty. We have permission to search for two 2-year postdocs for Fall 27 to fill the spots that will be vacated by our current postdocs. Our student credit hours are up considerably, and the university overall seems quite prosperous. It is disappointing that our tenure-track faculty is shrinking.
There are a number of accomplishments to note. Ilya Shapirovski, Prasit Bhattacharya and Adina Oprisan will be Associate Professors starting in the fall with Ilya and Adina receiving tenure (Prasit is early). Our College faculty Sarah Archuleta won the Roush Teaching Award for the university, and Dante DeBlassie won the Mentorship Award for the college. Our topology postdoc Dean Spyropolous has been awarded a fellowship in the fall at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA for the special program on quantum topology.
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