Hanbaek Lyu and Irfan Glogic, both students of our Ph.D. program,  have been awarded highly prestigious Presidential Fellowships by the Graduate School of the university. Presidential Fellowships recognize truly outstanding scholarship among doctoral students and provide recipients with a full year of support towards the completion of their dissertations.

Only about 20 of these awards are made every autumn and spring semester to the most exceptional students from the 94 doctoral programs on campus. Hanbaek and Irfan thus not only distinguished themselves in their research but also elevated the standing of our program within the university through our strong representation in this competition.

Hanbaek Lyu completed his bachelors degree at Seoul National University before entering our PhD program in 2013. By the end of his first year he had already completed articles on combinatorics and dynamical systems, most notably including his invention of the “firefly model”. Since his second year Hanbaek has been collaborating with Professor David Sivakoff, as his dissertation advisor, on many other aspects of cellular automata and models of excitable media. His research has a broad range of applications such as neural networks, complex physical and chemical systems, as well as social and economical models. Hanbaek has two published articles and numerous further articles in submission or at other stages of preparations. He has delivered invited talks at several universities both domestic and international on his research and evaluators have praised his contributions to have created and invigorated new research areas.

Irfan Glogic joined our doctoral program in 2012 after completing his masters degree at the University of Sarajevo. For the past two years Irfan has been conducting research under the guidance of his advisor Professor Ovidiu Costin on problems in non-linear partial differential equations and mathematics physics. More specifically, Irfan is working on stability questions of the so called Yang Mills equations. His proof of the spectral gap property and his treatment of these equations in negatively curved spaces have garnered praise and recognition by the most renown experts in the field. Thus far two of Irfan’s articles have been published in top journals. He has several more papers in preparation and presented his work in a colloquium talk. Irfan has also been a runner-up for this year’s Phil Huneke teaching awards and is a bronze medal winner in the International Mathematical Olympiad.