Providence Reporter

Jennifer Balakrishnan, the Clare Boothe Luce Associate Professor of Mathematics at Boston University, has been awarded the 2023-2024 AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars.

“It is an honor to be awarded the Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship, and I am deeply grateful for the support of my collaborators and mentors,” Balakrishnan said.  “I am looking forward to the opportunity this fellowship will provide in supporting a full-year sabbatical, as well as inviting a collaborator to visit Boston University.”

Balakrishnan's research is motivated by various aspects of the classical and p-adic Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjectures, as well as the problem of algorithmically finding rational points on curves.

Balakrishnan received an AB and AM from Harvard University and a PhD in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Kiran Sridhara Kedlaya. She was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, a Titchmarsh Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, and the AWM-Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. Balakrishnan is a Fellow of the AMS and AWM.

About the Fellowship:

The Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars is a mid-career research fellowship made possible by a generous gift from Joan and Joseph Birman.

The fellowship seeks to address the paucity of women at the highest levels of research in mathematics by giving exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years.

The most likely awardee will be a mid-career woman, based at a U.S. institution, whose achievements demonstrate significant potential for further contributions to mathematics. A requirement of this fellowship is that the awardee must be a member of the AMS at the time of application.

Candidates must have a carefully thought-through research plan for the fellowship period. Special circumstances (such as time taken off for care of children or other family members) may be taken into consideration in making the award. Awardees may use the fellowship in any way that most effectively enables their research: for instance, for release time, participation in special research programs, travel support, childcare, etc. The award is issued through the recipient's institution, and no part of it may be utilized for indirect costs.

The award for the 2023-2024 academic year is expected to be in the amount of $50,000.

Original source can be found here.