Victor Lie was selected to receive the 2009 Clay Mathematics Institute Liftoff Award, a prestigious prize given annually to best new PhD graduates in the U.S. Lie has finished his dissertation under the supervision of Professor Christoph Thiele and will start a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in the fall.

Congratulations to Russ Howes, Maria Pavlovskaia and Hakan Seyalioglu on being awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships this year. The graduate research fellowships are a prestigious multi-year award given annually by the National Science Foundation in a variety of fields of study, including mathematics.

Congratulations to 2008 UCLA PhD Inessa Epstein who was recently awarded the prestigious Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) Sacks Prize for her outstanding logic dissertation "Some results on orbit inequivalent actions of non-amenable groups." The prize is awarded annually to the best dissertation in logic worldwide and is shared by Epstein and another recipient. Inessa Epstein is currently an NSF postdoctoral research fellow at Caltech.

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has selected UCLA Mathematics PhD student Jeremy Brandman as one of the winners in the 2008 SIAM Student Paper Competition. This prestigious award is given to only three students yearly, worldwide. Jeremy will be awarded the student paper prize for "A Level-Set Method for Computing the Eigenvalues of Elliptic Operators Defined on Closed Surfaces" at the society's annual meeting to be held July 7-11, in San Diego, California. He will complete his thesis this year under UCLA Math Professor Stanley Osher and will conduct his NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.