PRIMES: Program Staff

Chief Research Advisor / Mathematics Faculty Lead

Pavel Etingof is Professor of Mathematics in the Mathematics Department at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University in 1994, under Igor Frenkel . He taught at Harvard as a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor in 1994-1999, joined the MIT mathematics faculty as an assistant professor in 1998, and became a full professor in 2005. Professor Etingof's research interests are noncommutative algebra, representation theory, mathematical physics. He served as Director of Graduate Studies at the MIT mathematics department in 2002-2007. Professor Etingof has led mathematics research programs for high school students at the Clay Mathematics Research Academy in 2004 and 2005, and suggested and supervised 10 high school research projects at the Research Science Institute (RSI) at MIT.

Program Director

Slava Gerovitch is Lecturer in History of Mathematics and Director of Research and Reading Programs in the Mathematics Department at MIT. He has received a Master's degree in applied mathematics and a PhD in history and social study of science from MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program, under Loren Graham . He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics , Voices of the Soviet Space Program , Soviet Space Mythologies . Dr. Gerovitch's research interests are history of mathematics, cybernetics, and computing; space history and space policy; and history of Russian and Soviet science and technology. The courses he taught at MIT include history of science , history of computing , and cultural history of mathematics . His current research project is on social history of Soviet mathematics .

Bioinformatics Faculty Lead

Gil Alterovitz is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he is also the director of the Biomedical Cybernetics Laboratory. He has led SMART-on-FHIR Genomics, HL7 FHIR Genomics, and Sync for Genes efforts. He has served as co-chair of the Clinical Genomics Workgroup, co-chair of the Data Exchange & Interoperability stream subgroup of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, member of the national Precision Medicine Task Force, and named a Presidential Innovation Fellow. Dr. Alterovitz has published or presented in over 50 peer-reviewed publications and published three books.

Head Mentor

Tanya Khovanova is Lecturer in the Mathematics Department at MIT. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Moscow State University in 1988, under Israel Gelfand . Her research was in representation theory, integrable systems, quantum groups, and superstring theory. Currently she is interested in combinatorics and recreational mathematics. Dr. Khovanova is also Menezes Challenge Mentor in the MathROOTS program and head mentor in the Math section of MIT's Research Science Institute (RSI) . She has created the popular Number Gossip site.

Junior Section Coordinator

Thomas Rüd is a postdoctoral associate and instructor hosted by Wei Zhang. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2022 under the supervision of Julia Gordon, where he won the math graduate research award. His research interests are in algebraic number theory, specifically in harmonic analysis of p-adic groups and local-global principles. Since coming to MIT he took many opportunities to share his love of mathematics. He was involved in PRIMES since 2023, was a 2025 Lusztig PRIMES mentor, mentored at DRP, worked with MIT Prison Education Initiative, and won the Charles and Holly Housman Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Sophomore Section Coordinator

Felix Gotti is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and an Instructor in Applied Mathematics in the Mathematics Department at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2019 under Prof. Lauren Williams. Dr. Gotti's research primarily focuses on algebraic combinatorics and commutative ring theory. He is currently interested in subdivisions of polytopes and atomic decompositions in integral domains. Recent courses he has taught include combinatorial analysis and multiplicative ideal theory. Dr. Gotti also supervises research projects in CrowdMath , a joint initiative of MIT PRIMES and Art of Problem Solving.

PRIMES Circle Section Coordinators

Paige Bright is a Ph.D. student in the MIT mathematics department, and was previously a M.Sc. student at the University of British Columbia. Before beginning graduate school, Paige received a S.B. in mathematics from MIT. She is interested in analysis, and more specifically, harmonic analysis, projection theory, and geometric measure theory. She has been a residential counselor, academic mentor, and assistant residential director for √mathroots. In her free time, Paige likes blogging and spending way too much time at coffee shops.

Dora Woodruff is a PhD student at MIT supported by an NSF GRFP Fellowship and advised by Alexander Postnikov. Her main research area is enumerative and algebraic combinatorics, and Schubert polynomials/Schur polynomials, as well as pattern avoidance in permutations, are topics that particularly interest her.

Yulia's Dream Program Coordinator

Dmytro Matvieievskyi is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Umass Amherst. He received his Ph.D. from Northeastern University in 2022, studying under Ivan Losev and Valerio Toledano Laredo. Dmytro's research is centered around geometric representation theory, the most recent projects studying the theory of unipotent representations.

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