Roberto Hernandez Palomares 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 during the completion of their dissertations. Only about twenty of these very prestigious awards are made every semester among the most outstanding students from 94 doctoral programs across the entire OSU campus.

Roberto received his bachelor's degree  in mathematics as a CIMAT honors fellow from the Universidad de Guanajuato in 2015. He joined our Ph.D. program in the same year with many initial interests, including differential geometry, mathematical physics, topological data analysis, and mathematical biology.

Roberto eventually decided to work in the general areas of operator algebra and tensor categories under the supervision of Professor David Penneys. He is currently pursuing several projects that deal with the classifications and constructions of particular types of categorical structures, invoking sophisticated algebraic, analytic, as well as combinatorial techniques.

Particularly noteworthy is his paper on module categories for generalized Temperley-Lieb-Jones 2-categories, which was recently accepted for publication in a strong research journal. The second author on the article is an undergraduate student from the University of Puerto Rico and SROP participant. Roberto distinguished himself not only as the leader in the project but also as the student's research mentor, resulting in an extraordinary recognition of the mentee by the Graduate School last summer in the form of an Osmer Fellowship offer.