The 2023 André Aisenstadt Prize awarded to Elina Robeva and Yakov Shlapentokh-Rothman

Elina Robeva received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2016, under the direction of Bernd Sturmfels, working in algebraic geometry, and is now working to apply algebra, geometry, and combinatorics to problems in data science and machine learning. Her thesis was honoured by Berkeley’s Bernard Friedman Prize in Applied Mathematics. After a NSF postdoctoral fellowship at MIT (2016-2019), she joined the Department of Mathematics of the University of British Columbia in 2019 where she supervises a diverse group of students. She has organized numerous seminars and symposia.

Professor Robeva’s work connects statistics, geometry, Lie theory, and non-commutative algebra, and has made ground-breaking contributions to the statistics and geometry that underlie data science topics of considerable interest to scientists and engineers. She has won the SIAM Early Career Prize in Algebraic Geometry, the CAIMS Early Career Award, as well as the UBC/PIMS Mathematical Sciences Young Faculty Award.

Yakov Shlapentokh-Rothman received his PhD from MIT in 2015 under the supervision of Igor Rodnianski. After a NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University (2015-2018), he continued there as Assistant Professor before joining the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto in 2021.

Professor Shlapentokh-Rothman works primarily on the mathematics of general relativity. His primary contributions concern the dynamical development of  singularities associated to black holes; the decay of scalar and higher spin waves on black hole backgrounds; the existence of time-periodic “breather” solutions; and the understanding of weak null singularities in black hole interiors with matter present. He was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2021.

2023 André Aisenstadt Prize Lectures