PRIMES: Mentors

Mathematics

Jesse Geneson is an applied math graduate student. He was an RSI mentor in 2011-2013 and a PRIMES mentor in 2012-2013. His RSI student, Sitan Chen, won the 3rd Prize at 2011 Siemens Competition and became a national finalist at 2012 Intel STS; two other RSI students became Intel STS semifinalists, and one became a Siemens semifinalist. His PRIMES students, Jonathan Tidor and Rohil Prasad, won the 5th Prize at the 2012 Siemens Competition.

	David Corwin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. He is interested in number theory and its connections to other fields of mathematics, including algebraic geometry, algebraic geometry, and representation theory. He attended Canada/USA Mathcamp in high school and then attended Princeton University as an undergraduate. He has been a counselor at PROMYS, has taught at MIT Splash, and has been a mentor for MIT's Directed Reading Program in January 2014.
	Peter Csikvari is Instructor in Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. His research interests include Extremal and Algebraic Combinatorics.
	Sherry Gong is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
	Darij Grinberg is a Ph.D. student in the Mathematics Department. His field of interest is algebra, especially constructive algebra, representation theory and algebraic combinatorics. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2012-2013. In 2012 he co-mentored William Kuszmaul and Ziling Zhou, who became 2012 Siemens regional finalists; in 2013 he mentored William Kuszmaul, who became 2014 Intel STS finalist, 2013 Siemens semifinalist, and 2013 Davidson Fellow.
	Benjamin Iriarte is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
	Chiheon Kim is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. His research interests includes combinatorial optimization and discrete geometry. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2013. His student, Junho Won, became 2014 Intel STS semifinalist and won Outstanding Presentation award at 2014 MAA Undergraduate Student Poster Session.
	Alisa Knizel is a Ph.D. student in the Math department at MIT.
	Augustus Lonergan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
	Laszlo Miklos Lovasz is a Ph.D. student in the Math department at MIT. His research interests include extremal combinatorics, graph theory, and algebra. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2013. His students, Kavish Gandhi and Noah Golowich, won the 2nd Prize in the 2013 Siemens Competition.
	Akhil Mathew is a math major at Harvard. He has taught classes for high school students through Harvard's and MIT's HSSP program. He participated in the RSI program in 2009 as a student and won the 3rd prize in Intel STS and also ranked 3rd in mathematics at ISEF. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2013. His student, Ravi Jagadeesan, became 2013 Siemens semifinalist (for a project done outside of PRIMES).
	Rik Sengupta is a Ph.D. student in the mathematics department at MIT. He is interested in combinatorics and graph theory, as well as theoretical computer science. He especially likes extremal and structural problems. Rik has mentored students in PRIMES, RSI, and SPUR. His student, Raj Raina, became a semifinalist in the Intel and Siemens competitions.
	Wuttisak Trongsiriwat is a Ph.D. student in the mathematics department at MIT. His research is in enumerative and algebraic combinatorics. He was an RSI mentor in 2011 and a PRIMES mentor in 2013. His student, Nihal Gowravaram, became 2014 Intel STS semifinalist.
	Umut Varolgunes is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematics at MIT.
	Dr. Aaron Welters is Instructor in Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. His research interests are in mathematical physics and applied mathematics. He focuses on the areas of electromagnetics, material science, and dissipative systems.
	Ben Yang is a Ph.D. student in the MIT Math Department. research His research area is incidence geometry. He was a SPUR mentor in 2013, winning the Rogers Prize for the best paper with his students, Zipei Nie and Anthony Wang.
	Yufei Zhao is a Ph.D. student in the MIT Math Department. His research interests include extremal and probabilistic combinatorics and graph theory.

Computer Science

Dr. Gil Alterovitz is at the Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and Technology Division Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP). He is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and Harvard Medical School Partners' Center for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG). He is involved in developing methods for studying biological networks and signal processing within proteomics. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2012-2013. In 2012 at PRIMES he mentored Peijin Zhang, who became a regional finalist in the 2012 Siemens competition.

	Soheil Feizi is a graduate student at MIT affiliated with CSAIL, RLE and the Broad Institute. His research interests include mathematical understanding of functions and structures of networks with applications in computational biology, social networks, and communications. He uses several techniques to design network algorithms borrowing from machine learning, network science, signal processing, and information theory.
	Tom Howard is a Research Scientist in the Robotics, Vision, and Sensor Networks Group (RVSN), Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT. His research interests are Mobile Robots, Motion Planning, Navigation, Control, Mobile Manipulation, Redundant Manipulators, System Identification, Autonomous Systems.
	Ling Ren is a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT.
	Rishabh Singh is a graduate student in the Computer-Aided Programming (CAP) group at MIT. He is passionate about developing new program synthesis techniques for helping programmers, end-users, and students. Apart from research, he enjoys playing bridge and is honored to have been selected for the Indian junior national bridge team..
	Christos Tzamos is a graduate student in the theory of computation group at CSAIL, MIT. He is interested in Algorithmic Game Theory, Machine Learning as well as in the Design, Analysis and Theory of Algorithms. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2013. Together with Matt Weinberg, he mentored Nicolaas Kaashoek and William Wu, who became 2013 Siemens semifinalists.
	Matt Weinberg is a PhD student in the Theory of Computation Group in CSAIL at MIT. He is interested in algorithms and algorithmic game theory, and mechanism design in particular. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2013. Together with Christos Tzamos, he mentored Nicolaas Kaashoek and William Wu, who became 2013 Siemens semifinalists.
	Angela Yen is a Ph.D. student in the EECS Department at MIT. She researches in the Computational Biology group. She is especially interested in research related to epigenomics and population variation. She was a PRIMES mentor in 2013.
	Xiangyao Yu is a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT. His research interest lies in Computer Architecture and Database Systems. He is currently working on the scalability of OLTP database systems on future 1000-core architecture. Specifically, he is identifying bottlenecks in concurrency control, logging and indexing subsystems and trying to solve these problems using software/hardware codesign.

Computational and Physical Biology

	Geoff Fudenberg is a PhD student in Biophysics at Harvard. His research interest is 3D Genome Organization: physical models, statistical methods, and comparative genomics. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2011-2013.
	Maksim Imakaev is a PhD student in the Physics Department at MIT. His research interest is 3D Genome Organization. He was a PRIMES mentor in 2011-2013.

Email us: Primes@math.mit.edu