Ruth I. Michler Prize 2009-2010

The Association for Women in Mathematics and Cornell University are pleased to announce that Maria Gordina, University of Connecticut, will receive the third 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.

Maria Gordina was selected to receive the Michler Prize because of her talent as mathematician and her international reputation. Gordina earned a Diploma in Mathematics and Education from Leningrad State University in 1990. She carried out her doctoral work at Cornell University, where she investigated holomorphic functions and the heat kernel measure under the direction of Leonard Gross. She was a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University and then an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Diego with Bruce Driver. In 2003, Gordina began a tenure track appointment in the mathematics department at the University of Connecticut. She was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2005 to work with Michael Röckner. In 2007, she was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut.

Maria Gordina’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation. She is highly regarded for her “significant body of high quality work” and her “excellent reputation both here and abroad.” Gordina’s primary interests involve heat kernel measures and their properties in the context of infinite dimensional non-linear spaces. The construction of these heat kernel measures and their quasi-invariance properties have applications in mathematical physics and involve techniques at the interface between stochastic analysis, differential geometry, and functional analysis.

At Cornell, Gordina plans to collaborate with Leonard Gross (Cornell), Laurent Saloff-Coste (Cornell) and S. Rajeev (Rochester) on problems connecting infinite-dimensional Lie groups, Lie algebras and Laplacians in infinite dimensions with applications in quantum field theory and hydrodynamics.