Ruth I. Michler Prize 2017-2018

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and Cornell University are pleased to announce that Julia Gordon, University of British Columbia, Canada will receive the 2017–2018 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.

Julia Gordon was selected to receive the Michler Prize because of her wide range of mathematical talents and the connection of her work with the research of Cornell faculty members Nicolas Templier and Birgit Speh. She earned a Diploma (MS equivalent) from St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia in 1998. Gordon received her PhD in mathematics, under the direction of Thomas C. Hales, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2003.

Immediately before coming to the University of British Columbia in 2006, where she is currently an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, Gordon was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Before that she spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and a semester as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fields Institute for Research in
Mathematical Sciences, Canada.

Gordon’s research is in the areas of representation theory of p-adic groups and of motivic integration. Her research is partially funded by a series of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants which she has had since 2006.

About her upcoming semester at Cornell, Gordon says: “In 2011, Nicolas Templier and Sug Woo Shin asked about the possibility of making a uniform bound for orbital integrals, which was needed for their work on low-lying zeroes of L-functions. Raf Cluckers, I. Halupczok and I were able to develop this bound, and while at Cornell, I plan to work with Templier on further applications of such bounds. Separately, I have been working with J. Achter and S. Ali Altuğ on a different project of counting the number of abelian varieties in an isogeny class. Some of the calculations done in this project are related to the trace formula and Templier’s area of expertise. I am hoping to learn more about this from him during the term at Cornell. I also hope to talk to Birgit Speh about real Lie groups and mysterious analogies between harmonic analysis on real and on p-adic reductive groups.”