Ruth I. Michler Prize 2019-2020

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and Cornell University are pleased to announce that Anna Skripka, University of New Mexico, will receive the 2019–2021 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.

Anna Skripka was selected to receive the Michler Prize to persue proposed project to connect some of her recent work in noncommutative analysis with the research of Cornell faculty member Prof. Michael Nussbaum on statistical problems of estimation, regression, and asymptotic analysis. Skripka earned her B.S. degrees from Kharkiv National University, Ukraine (2001) and her Ph.D. (2007) from the University of Missouri under the direction of Konstantin A. Makarov. She has been at the University of New Mexico since 2012, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Prior to that, Skripka was an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M. She held invited positions at the University of California, Berkeley; Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon; and the University of New South Wales. She has been awarded 4 single-investigator NSF awards including a CAREER award.

Skripka has been working primarily in the areas of noncommutative analysis and operator theory on problems that emerged from quantum theory. Her proposed research will expand to noncommutative aspects of probability and statistics and combine function analytic and probabilistic methods.

About her upcoming semester at Cornell, Skripka says: “I look forward to this unique opportunity for participating in the dynamic research life at Cornell’s mathematics department and interacting with Cornell experts in probability and analysis. I plan to collaborate with Prof. Michael Nussbaum on problems of quantum statistics and asymptotically efficient estimation.

The existing partial results suggest that these problems should be approached by both analytic and statistical methods in their subtle combination, which we hope to find by joining our expertise. I also hope to advance on noncommutative approximation theory with help of consultations on combinatorial and multilinear harmonic analysis methods. I am eager to explore new techniques and directions in probability and analysis at the departmental seminars.”