The Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars

Support top female scholars in mathematics with this mid-career fellowship. Make a gift

Margaret Beck, Lillian Pierce, Karin Melnick, Helen Wong Birman Fellowship Winners
L to R: Margaret Beck 2018-2019 | Lillian Pierce 2019-2020 | Karin Melnick 2020-2021 | Helen Wong 2021-2022 | Bianca Viray 2022-2023 | Jennifer Balakrishnan 2023-2024 | Greta Panova 2024-2025
 

Established in 2018, the Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars is a mid-career research fellowship specially designed to suit the career timelines of women and to address the paucity of female scholars at the highest levels of research mathematics. The fellowship can be used to provide additional time for research, opportunities to work with collaborators, and more. Your gift to this endowed fund will help increase the occurrence and/or size of this award.

The Fellowships awarded to date are:

  • 2023–2024 Greta Panova, University of Southern California, for her research in Algebraic Combinatorics with connections to Representation Theory, Computational Complexity Theory within Theoretical Computer Science and with Probability and Statistical Mechanics. Separately, she works with a team of molecular biologists on modeling DNA repair dynamics. Read the news release.
  • 2023–2024 Jennifer Balakrishnan, Boston University, for her research in 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. Read the news release.
  • 2022–2023 Bianca Viray, University of Washington, for her research in arithmetic geometry, the area that applies algebraic geometry techniques to problems in number theory. Read the news release.
  • 2021–2022 Helen Wong, Claremont McKenna College, for her research in quantum topology and applications of topology. Read the news release.
  • 2020-2021 Karin Melnick, University of Maryland, College Park, for her work on differential geometric aspects of rigidity. Read the news release.
  • 2019–2020 Lilian Pierce, Duke University, for her research in analytic number theory and harmonic analysis. Read the news release.
  • 2018–2019 Margaret Beck, Boston University, for her research on stability problems in partial differential equations and spatially extended dynamical systems. Read the news release.
  • Visit the Birman Fellowship Prize main page for more information and to apply.
Joan S. Birman
Joan S. Birman

Did You Know?

Joan S. Birman earned her Ph.D. in mathematics at 41 years of age and went on to become a leading scholar of braid theory and knot theory. Read about her career and her reasons for creating this fellowship .