Professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya wins Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research

The UC Irvine Academic Senate recently awarded Professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya of the UCI Department of Mathematics their Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research. The designation comes in the wake of a robust research career that focuses on mathematical physics and dynamical systems, and which is replete with honors. In 2005 Jitomirskaya received the American Mathematical Society’s Satter Prize, in 2018 she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and  Sciences, in 2019 she was awarded the American Physical Society and American Institute of Physics Dannie Heineman Prize in Mathematical Physics, and last year was selected to give a plenary talk at the International Congress of Mathematics — a meeting often called the Olympics of mathematics. She’s also the recipient of two recent awards from the Simons Foundation — a foundation dedicated to the advancement of mathematics and the sciences. A targeted grant will support research into two-dimensional materials, while the other, a fellowship, gave Jitomirskaya funding to go on a sixth month-long sabbatical in 2020. “I am tremendously honored to receive this award. It is truly humbling for me to look at the list of the past recipients, going back to Sherry Rowland in 1977,” Jitomirskaya said. “All the more so because the only other mathematician previously so honored was Don Saari in 2004, a man who revolutionized not only a big area of math, but also economics and other fields. Being on this list along with my heroes such as Don is a great distinction and a big responsibility.”