Assistant Professor Giulia Saccà received the Anna Maria Molteni Award in Mathematics and Physics for her research on hyper-Kähler geometries. She was among five young Italian researchers working in North America who received 2017 ISSNAF Awards on November 8 at the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
In 2016 Saccà constructed a hyper-Kähler compactification of the intermediate Jacobian fibration associated to a general cubic fourfold, proving a conjecture of Donagi-Markman from 1994. In 2017, Saccà studied degenerations of hyper-Kähler manifolds, generalizing work on K3 surfaces of Kulivov and Pinkham-Persson. In the field of Riemann surfaces, Saccà has worked toward giving the first explicit equations for a “general” curve, thereby answering an open question of Harris-Morrison from 1998.
Giulia received her BS and MA from La Sapienza in Rome and her PhD from Princeton in 2013. Before moving to MIT, she was a J.H. Simons Instructor at Stony Brook University and in 2014-2015 a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her thesis won the 2014 Federigo Enriques Prize from the Unione Matematica Italiana.
Each year, the ISSNAF (Italian Scientists and Scholars of North America Foundation) acknowledges young Italian researchers by presenting the ISSNAF Awards for Young Investigators in five subjects and awarding the winner in each category with a $3,000 prize. Congratulations Giulia!