Osama Khalil has been awarded a Presidential Fellowship by the Ohio State Graduate School.

Presidential Fellowships recognize truly outstanding scholarship among doctoral students and provide recipients with a full year of support towards the completion of their dissertations. Less than twenty of these very prestigious awards are made every semester among the most outstanding students from 94 doctoral programs across the entire OSU campus.

Osama received his bachelor degrees in mathematics and computer science in 2011 from the American University in Cairo. In the following two years he earned bachelor degrees in medicine and surgery from the Cairo University School of Medicine and worked as a research fellow at Microsoft. In 2013 Osama entered our Ph.D. program as a University Fellow. 

Since the beginning of his third year Osama has been working under the supervision of Professor Nimish Shah on a wide range of topics in the general areas of homogeneous dynamics, ergodic theory, and rigid geometry. These include new methods for matrix Diophantine approximations, significant progress on the Sparse Equidistribution Conjecture and generalizations of Birkhoff's Ergodic Theorem, as well as results on Apollonian Circle Packings and Billiard Dynamics.

Osama has three research articles accepted for publication in strong journals, on two of which he is the sole author. In addition, he has at least two more papers in submission and various further ongoing projects. He has presented his results at several national conferences, at workshops, and in seminar talks at some of the best schools. His letter writers from other US and international universities uniformly praise the significance of his contributions to several different fields as well as his impressive versatility, creativity, and scholarly independence.  

In 2016 Osama also received the university's Graduate Associate Teaching Award. He thus belongs to the very small and exclusive group of graduate students on campus who have won both of the highest recognitions awarded by the Graduate School.