Svetlana Jitomirskaya wins fellowship to fund yearlong sabbatical

The Simons Foundation awards fellowships to mathematicians and theoretical physicists with remarkable bodies of work. In December, mathematics Professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya discovered she would get a 2020 Simons fellowship. Jitomirskaya’s fellowship award totals $660,000, and the windfall will fund a part of her sabbatical for the upcoming academic year. Before, she was only going to take one quarter off for the sabbatical — but now she can use the entire year to further her research, which currently focuses on the mathematics of quantum materials.

This is the second Simons Award for Jitomirskaya, who received the award for the first time in 2014, and the third for the Mathematics Department. In 2018, Professor Anton Gorodetski also became a Simons fellow.

“I had robust travel plans for my sabbatical,” says Jitomirskaya. But with the coronavirus epidemic sweeping the world, she had to cancel some of her work trips. The one silver lining is that she now has more time to focus on her research projects. “I’m sure I’ll be producing a lot more,” she says