Galyna Dobrovolska, a senior majoring in math, has been chosen as co-winner of the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. She will receive an award of $750, to be presented by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) at their Jan. 7 meeting in San Diego. The last MIT winner of the Schafer Prize was Ruth Britto-Pacumio, in 1995.
In their letter announcing the award, AWM judges wrote, "Dobrovolska has distinguished herself through her impressive and original mathematical research. Her research is focused in algebra and would be considered broad even for a mathematician much further along in their career."
On Nov. 16, Cardinal Warde, professor of electrical engineering, will receive the Caribbean American Heritage Award for Excellence in Science and Technology. Since its inception, the Caribbean American Heritage Awards has sought to recognize immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants from the Caribbean who by their work have helped build America.
Warde is considered one of the world's leading experts on materials, devices and systems for optical information processing.
Lita Nelsen, director of the Technology Licensing Office at MIT, has been chosen by the Massachusetts Society for Medical Research (MSMR) as a 2007 Biomedical Research Leader. She was recognized by the MSMR board of directors for the depth of her contributions to biomedical research in the state and the entire region. Nelsen's award cites "Her immeasurable contribution to the vitality of biomedical research in Massachusetts and beyond."
The Technology Licensing Office, where Nelsen has worked since 1986, manages over 500 new inventions per year from MIT, the Whitehead Institute and Lincoln Laboratory. Typically, they negotiate more than 100 licenses and start up more than 20 new companies per year.
Steve Ross has been chosen as this year's recipient of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize. This prize, created in 2005 by the City of Toulouse in partnership with Institut d'Economie Industrielle, honors an economist whose work combines theoretical and applied aspects of economics. Professor Ross is best known as the inventor of the widely applied Arbitrage Pricing Theory, an approach to determining asset prices.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 31, 2007 (download PDF).
