2009 AIM Five-Year Fellowship

AIM is pleased to announce that Melanie Matchett Wood has been named an AIM Five-Year Fellow. She works in Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry and will receive her PhD from Princeton University in June, 2009. Her thesis, ``Moduli spaces for rings and ideals'' was written under the direction of Manjul Bhargava. Melanie's research is at the interface of number theory and algebraic geometry, constructing geometric moduli spaces whose points correspond to number theoretic objects of interest. Melanie represented the United States in the International Mathematics Olympiad team in 1998 and 1999. An undergraduate at Duke University, she was a Putnam Fellow in 2002 and also won the Alice Shaeffer Prize that year. In 2003 she won the Morgan Prize for best original mathematical research by an undergraduate.       AIM is pleased to announce that Kirsten Graham Wickelgren has been named a 2009 AIM Five-Year Fellow. Kirsten will be receiving her PhD this year from Stanford University under the direction of Gunnar Carlsson. Kirsten graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in 2003 and received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to pursue her graduate studies. Her research is at the interface of topology and arithmetic and algebraic geometry. In her thesis, Kirsten examines cohomological obstructions to the existence of sections of the map on etale fundamental groups induced by the structure map of a curve over a number field.
     
The other finalists for the Fellowship are Jonah Blasiak of the University of California, Berkeley and Sucharit Sarkar of Princeton University.