MIT Mathematics Homepage

This summer, the Department welcomed to our faculty Assistant Professors Jeanne Boursier, Alex Damian, Jorge Garza-Vargas, and Naomi Sweeting.

Jeanne Boursier received her PhD in Mathematics from Université Paris-Dauphine in 2022, under the supervision of Djalil Chafaï and Sylvia Serfaty. Before joining MIT, she was a postdoctoral researcher at ENS Lyon and a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Her research is in probability theory, with a focus on statistical physics. She is particularly interested in phase transitions and spin glasses.

Alex Damian is an assistant professor in Mathematics and EECS[AI+D]. His research focuses on the mathematical foundations of deep learning, with an emphasis on optimization dynamics and representation learning. He was previously a Kempner Research Fellow at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University, advised by Jason Lee, and his B.S. in Mathematics from Duke University.

Jorge Garza-Vargas joined the Department of Mathematics at MIT in 2026. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was advised by Nikhil Srivastava and Dan-Virgil Voiculescu. Prior to joining MIT, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the CMS Department at Caltech and an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University. He is broadly interested in the interactions between combinatorics, functional analysis, and probability, and has worked on both pure and applied problems in mathematics.

Naomi Sweeting received her BA in mathematics with honors from the University of Chicago in 2019. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2024, where she was advised by Professor Mark Kisin. In 2023, she was a visiting graduate student at the Simons-Lauffer mathematical institute. From 2024 to 2026, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, advised by Professor Christopher Skinner. Both her graduate and postdoctoral studies were supported by NSF fellowship grants. Since 2026, she has been a tenure-track assistant professor at MIT. Sweeting was awarded the Alice T. Schafer prize from the Association of Women in Mathematics in 2019, and the AWM Dissertation Prize in 2024 for her thesis on "Tate classes and endoscopy for GSp(4) over totally real fields." Her research interests include Shimura varieties, automorphic representations, and cases of the Bloch-Kato conjectures.

SPUR/SPUR+ (Summer Program in Undergraduate Research) culminated with two teams sharing the 2026 Hartley Rogers Jr. Family Prize for the best SPUR paper.

Research conducted by Sam Zhang was mentored by Saba Lepsveridze and suggested by Nike Sun. The Prize was also awarded to Edward Li, with mentor Yonghwan Kim, a project suggested by Paul Seidel.

They were among 11 MIT undergraduates who presented 8 individual or joint research projects at the SPUR 2026 Conference to judges Ankur Moitra, Semyon Dyatlov, and Andrew Sutherland.

This summer's RSI (Research Science Institute) Symposium featured 11 exceptional high school students from around the world presenting their math research projects, as mentored by six graduate students, faculty advisors David Jerison and Jonathan Bloom, and head mentor Tanya Khovanova.

Our RSI students won best papers and best presentation awards at RSI 2026:

Nikola Veselinov won best paper, under the mentorship of Ayan Nath. Sylvia Lee also won best paper, mentored by Ashu Tripathi. Tony (Guanjie) Lu was awarded best presentation, mentored by Alexander McWeeney.