Ruth I. Michler Prize 2008-2009

The Association for Women in Mathematics and Cornell University are pleased to announce that Irina Mitrea, University of Virginia, will receive the second annual Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize. The Michler Prize is unique—it grants a mid-career woman in academe a residential fellowship in the Cornell University mathematics department without teaching obligations. This pioneering venture was established through a very generous donation from the Michler family and the efforts of many people at AWM and Cornell.

Irina Mitrea was selected to receive the Michler Prize because of her past achievements and future promise. Mitrea earned an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1993. She carried out her doctoral work at the University of Minnesota, where she investigated the spectral properties of elliptic layer potentials under the direction of Carlos Kenig and Mikhail Safonov. A postdoctoral membership at the Insitute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 2000–2001 was followed by her appointment as an H. C. Wang Assistant Professor at Cornell University. In 2004, Mitrea began a tenure track appointment in the mathematics department at the University of Virginia. In 2007, she was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor.

Mitrea has organized several mathematics programs for girls, including Sonia Kovalevsky Days for high school girls and the Girls and Mathematics summer program for middle school girls. She serves as a mathematics consultant for the Young Women Leaders Program at the University of Virginia.

Mitrea’s area of expertise is at the interface between Real and Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. In particular, combining harmonic analysis techniques and partial differential equations methods, she studies second and higher order elliptic boundary value problems in non-smooth domains. She is highly regarded for “her excellent taste in research problems, her depth and her technical power.” Mitrea is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award.