Ruth I. Michler Prize 2014-2015

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and Cornell University are pleased to announce that Sema Salur, University of Rochester will receive the 2014-15 Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize. The Michler Prize grants a mid-career woman in academia 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.

Sema Salur was selected to receive the Michler Prize because of her wide range of mathematical talents. In 1993 she earned a B.S. in Mathematics from Boğaziçi University, Turkey. Salur received her PhD in mathematics, under the direction of Gang Tian, from Michigan State University in 2000.

Before coming to University of Rochester in 2006, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics,
Salur spent time as a visiting assistant professor at both Cornell University and Northwestern University. She has been a research fellow at Princeton University, the Mathematical Science Research Institute (MSRI) and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). In spring 2003 and spring 2004 she visited her collaborator Dominic Joyce at Oxford with the support from an AWM Mentoring grant. She will be spending the Spring 2015 semester at Cornell University.

Salur’s research is in the area of manifolds with special holonomy and calibrations. In particular she studies geometry and topology of the moduli spaces of calibrated submanifolds inside Calabi-Yau, G_2 and Spin(7) manifolds. Her work is partially funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation.

At Cornell Salur will continue her work on manifolds with special holonomy and Ricci flat metrics. She plans to collaborate with Xiaodong Cao and Yuri Berest on projects related to the geometric flows on G_2 and Spin(7) manifolds. Understanding these flows will have many applications in mathematical physics and algebraic geometry. She also plans to work with Tara Holm and Reyer Sjamaar on calibrated submanifolds and special vector fields on manifolds with special holonomy. These are similar to Hamiltonian vector fields which play an important role in symplectic geometry.