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Assistant Professor of Mathematics David Geraghty has been awarded a prestigious 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Geraghty is among the 126 outstanding US and Canadian researchers – including only 20 in mathematics – chosen this year to receive the fellowships, which are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars among the next generation of scientific leaders.
Geraghty’s selection marked the fourth Sloan fellowship for a Mathematics Department faculty member in the last three years, along with that of Associate Professor Joshua E. Greene and Assistant Professors Maksym Fedorchuk and David Treumann. The achievement puts BC in the company of MIT and Princeton University as the only universities to have four or more math faculty members named Sloan Research Fellows since 2013.
“David has made fundamental contributions to number theory, and the recognition provided by this Sloan Fellowship is well-deserved,” said Mathematics Department Chairman Solomon Friedberg, the James P. McIntyre Professor of Mathematics, and himself a Sloan Fellow early in his career. “I congratulate David on this award and on the achievements that led to it.”
A native of Dublin, Ireland, Geraghty earned his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University and his doctorate at Harvard University. Prior to joining BC in 2013, he was a Veblen Research Instructor for three years at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Geraghty’s research focuses on algebraic number theory and the sub-area of the Langlands program, a four-decades-old theoretical initiative probing the links between Galois representations and modular forms, areas respectively of modern algebra and complex analysis previously believed to be unrelated.
“I’m very excited to be named a Sloan Research Fellow and grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for this recognition,” said Geraghty, who teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. “I’m thankful to my colleagues, who put my name forward for this honor, and their belief in my work.”
Geraghty said the funding would support the collaborative nature of highly theoretical mathematics, taking him to conferences and workshops where scholars are pushing the boundaries of the discipline.
Friedberg noted that, with Geraghty’s selection, the Mathematics faculty includes seven Sloan Fellowship recipients.
“In addition to four Sloan Fellowships, in recent years our faculty have received National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, Simons Fellowships and the AWM Birman Research Prize,” said Friedberg. “It’s exciting to be at BC at a time when so many faculty members are doing scholarship at such a high level and getting the recognition they so richly deserve.”
Administered and funded by the Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are awarded in eight scientific fields—chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. Fellows receive $50,000 to be used to further their research.
Past Sloan fellows have gone on to receive some of the highest honors in science, engineering, economics and mathematics, including 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals in mathematics, 65 National Medals of Science and 14 John Bates Clark Medals in economics.