Postdoctoral Programs
To apply for a postdoctoral position, please see our job listings.
J.L. Doob Postdoctoral Program
This program, named in honor of mathematics Professor Emeritus Joseph L. Doob, began in Fall 1997 with two appointees. Appointees are named J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors. Each appointment is for a three-year term and is non-renewable. By 1999, there were six permanent J.L. Doob postdoctoral appointees on campus. Every year, two or three new appointments can be made. The Mathematics faculty act as mentors and collaborators for the postdoctoral appointees.
2011-2014 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Spencer Dowdall received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Chicago under the direction of Benson Farb. Dowdall's research interests are in geometric topology, mapping class groups, Teichmüller theory, and geometric group theory.
Jingwei Guo received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison under the direction of Andreas Seeger. His research interest is in harmonic analysis. In particular he is interested in its applications to the lattice point problem and other problems in analytic number theory.
Xiannan Li received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2011. His advisor was Kannan Soundararajan. Li's broad area of interest is analytic number theory and his recent research has involved L-functions.
Bernard Lidicky received his Ph.D. in 2011 from Charles University, Prague, under the direction of Jiri Fiala. His research interests are in graph theory and discrete algorithms.
2010-2013 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Philipp Hieronymi received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2008 under the supervision of Alex Wilkie. Before coming to Illinois, he spent a year as a DAAD fellow at the Fields Institute and McMaster University. His research in logic focuses on ordered structures and their potential applications in analysis and geometry.
Youness Lamzouri received his Ph.D. from the University of Montreal in 2009 under the supervision of Andrew Granville. Before coming to Illinois, he held a postdoctoral appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His research interests are in analytic, combinatorial and probabilistic number theory. He recently studied the distribution of extreme values of the Riemann zeta function and L-functions in the critical strip.
2009-2012 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Isidora Milin completed her Ph.D. in 2008 at Stanford University, under the supervision of Yasha Eliashberg. Her thesis dealt with contact dynamics and groups of contactomorphisms. During the 2008-09 school year, she was a postdoctoral fellow at The School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Her research interests lie in symplectic and contact geometry and Hamiltonian dynamics.
2008-2011 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. N. Elizabeth Csima received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation was completed last June under the supervision of Robert Kottwitz. It dealt with the study of F-crystals. Her research interests lie in algebraic geometry and number theory, particularly questions which arise from the study of Shimura varieties.
Dr. Pierre Fima received his Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Caen, France, under the direction of Professor Leonid Vainerman. He did his graduate studies in Ecole Normale Superieure and in Denis Diderot University in Paris. He worked for one year in the University of Besancon as a post doctoral researcher before coming to Illinois. His research interest lies at the intersection of operator algebras and quantum groups theory.
Dr. Bertrand Guillou received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2008 under the supervision of J. Peter May. His research interests are in homotopy theory, especially motivic and equivariant homotopy theory.
Dr. John Mackay received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2008, under the supervision of Professor Bruce Kleiner. He also spent most of the last two years visiting his advisor at Yale. His research interests include geometric group theory, analysis on metric spaces and topics involving the word "Gromov."
Dr. Bartlomiej Siudeja received his Ph.D. in 2008 at Purdue University under supervision of Professor Rodrigo Bañuelos. He received his MS degree at Wroclaw University of Technology. His dissertation was a mixture of stochastic processes and planar eigenvalue problems. He is actively pursuing both of those topics at Illinois.
2007-2010 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Jiri Lebl received his Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of California at San Diego under the supervision of Peter Ebenfelt. Lebl is currently interested in CR geometry (several complex variables) and most things related. Lebl was born in Prague when it was still Czechoslovakia but has lived in the U.S. since 1991.
Jeremy Rouse , a native of California, received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007 under the direction of Ken Ono. Rouse's research interests involve elliptic curves, modular forms, analytic number theory, and the relationships between them.
Andrew Schultz received his Ph.D. in 2007 from Stanford University. As an undergraduate, Schultz worked with John Swallow at Davidson College, studying the Galois module structure of certain invariants of fields. He continued this work in his Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Ravi Vakil at Stanford University, where he was also interested in exploring further connections to algebraic geometry and algebraic K-theory.
Sujith Vijay received his doctorate in 2007 from Rutgers University under the supervision of Professor Jozsef Beck. His dissertation dealt with arithmetic progressions, and his research interests lie at the intersection of combinatorics and number theory.
2006-2009 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Tao Mei, a native of China, received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M under the supervision of Dr. Gilles Pisier in 2006. Before he came to the U.S. in 2003, he spent one year in Besancon, France as a visiting scholar. His current research area concerns both functional analysis and harmonic analysis, especially in generalizations of classical results from harmonic analysis to operator valued (matrix valued) functions and related subjects, such as noncommutative martingales.
Dr. Julien Melleray received his Ph.D. in 2005 from Universite Paris 6 under the direction of advisor Jean Saint Raymond. His current research interests are linked with the study of Urysohn's universal Polish metric space and its applications to descriptive set theory and functional analysis. He is especially interested by the study of the isometry group of this space, and by the study of the geometry of its (uniquely determined) closed linear span.
2005-2008 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Zoi Rapti studied in Athens, Greece where she received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. She then attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she received her Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2004. After that she spent one year in Princeton, NJ at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her research interests are in applied mathematics. She has been studying the thermodynamics of nonlinear models for DNA denaturation using a transfer operator approach, and instabilities of the Nonliner Schrodinger Equation using dynamical systems methods.
2004-2007 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Nora Ganter received her Ph.D. in 2004 from MIT. Ganter's research interests are in interactions of elliptic cohomology with other areas of mathematics. She has been working at a homotopy theoretic interpretation of the theory of orbifold elliptic genera and product formulas.
Dr. Mingchu Gao received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of New Hampshire. His research interests are in several areas of functional analysis: operator algebras, operator spaces and free probability.
Dr. Nicolas Guay received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Chicago in the area of representation theory.
Dr. Panki Kim received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Washington. His research interests are stochastic process, probabilistic potential theory and PDEs.
Dr. Arnd Lauber received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Goettingen, Germany. His Ph.D. thesis was on the stability of Julia sets of transcendental function, which involves questions corresponding to the study of the Mandelbrot set for polynomials.
Dr. Young-Ran Lee received her Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Alabama at Birmingham under the direction of Yulia Karpeshina. Her thesis title was "Spectral properties of a polyharmonic operator with limit-periodic potential in dimension two."
2003-2006 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Emre Alkan received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison under the direction of Ken Ono. His research interests are automorphic and modular forms, and analytic number theory.
Dr. Christian Haesemeyer received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2003 under the direction of Eric M. Friedlander. His research interests are algebraic K-theory, topology and geometry.
2002-2005 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Alexander Berenstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. His field of research is model theory. Most of his thesis work was centered around defining a notion of independence inside structures related to Hilbert spaces.
Dr. Janne Heittokangas received his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Joensuu, Finland. He is interested in complex differential and functional equations, as well as all the other theories related to them.
2001-2004 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Bernhard Lamel received his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of California at San Diego. His research is in the area of geometry and several complex variables, with his primary interest in properties of mappings of real submanifolds in complex spaces of different dimensions. In 2001, he held a European Union Research Fellowship in Stockholm.
Dr. Jorge Rivera-Noriega received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri at Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Steven Hofmann. His research interests are related to harmonic analysis and partial differential equations.
Dr. Evgueni Vassiliev received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame under the direction of Professor Steven Buechler. His research field is mathematical logic, specifically model theory.
2000-2003 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Luis Alvarez-Consul received his Ph.D. degree in 2000 from the University Autonoma of Madrid. His thesis title was "The Geometry of Dimensional Reductions in Gauge Theory." His research interests are in gauge theory and algebraic geometry.
Dr. Peter Brinkmann received his Dipl.-Math in 1997 from the University of Bonn. He has been a teaching fellow at the University of Utah, and has been a visitor at Henri Poincare Institute in Paris. His thesis title was "Mapping Tori o f Automorphisms of Hyperbolic Groups."
Dr. Marco Schlichting received his Ph.D. degree in 2000 from the University of Paris 7. His thesis title was "Delooping the K-Theory of Exact Categories and Negative K-Groups."
1999-2002 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Wai Yan Pong has a 1999 Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research advisor is David E. Marker . His thesis is concerned with applications of model theory to differential algebra and algebraic geometry.
Dr. Marcin Mazur has a 1999 Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. His research advisor was Spencer Bloch . His research interests are in number theory and group theory.
1998-2001 The J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Maria Basterra has a 1998 Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. Her thesis advisor was Peter May . Her main research interest is Algebraic Topology with Homological Algebra as a secondary interest. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1992.
Dr. Nadya Shirokova has a 1998 Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago. Her thesis advisor was Shmuel Weinberger . Her major research interests are low-dimensional topology, singularity theory, and group actions on manifolds. She received her undergraduate education at Moscow University in Mathematics.
1997-2000 J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professors
Dr. Tibor Szabó has a 1996 Ph.D. degree from The Ohio State University, earned under the supervision of Professor Ákos Seress . During 1996-97, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His area of interest is extremal combinatorics. He received his undergraduate diploma with distinction from the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in 1990. In 1995 he was awarded the Presidential Fellowship of The Ohio State University.
Dr. Tadashi Tokieda has a 1996 Ph.D. degree from Princeton University. His advisor was William Browder . During 1996-97, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at McGill University in Montreal. His interest is in symplectic topology and Hamiltonian dynamics. He is a 1989 classics graduate from Jochi University in Tokyo and has a 1991 bachelor degree from Oxford University in Mathematics.
VIGRE Postdoctoral Program
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the Department of Mathematics a grant for Vertical Integration of Research and Education (VIGRE) for 2000-2005. The funding provided the department the opportunity to expand it programs that create interaction of scholars across boundaries of academic age and departmental standing.
2004-2007 VIGRE Research Assistant Professors:
Dr. Clifton Ealy received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests are model theory and algebra, simple theories.
Dr. Stephen Hartke received his Ph.D. in 2004 from Rutgers University where he worked with Fred Roberts on applying discrete methods to problems in epidemiology and ecology. His continues to work in his main research areas of graph theory and combinatorics.
Dr. Prabhu Janakiraman received his Ph.D. in 2004 from Purdue University under the direction of Professor Rodrigo Balnuelos. His thesis work involved estimation of weak-type constants for singular integral and maximal operators.
2002-2005 VIGRE Research Assistant Professors:
Dr. Patrick Bahls received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2002. His research is mostly in geometric and combinatorial group theory.
Dr. Matthew Boylan received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2002 with a dissertation on applications of congruences for Fourier coefficients of modular forms. He is interested in applying modular forms to number theory, combinatorics, and arithmetic algebraic geometry.
Dr. Donald Yau received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2002. His main research field is algebraic topology. He is interested in the interactions between cohomology of spaces and their algebraic models, such as algebras over the Steenrod algebra for mod p cohomology and lambda-rings for K-theory.
2001-2004 VIGRE Research Assistant Professors:
Dr. Christopher French received his Ph.D. in algebraic topology from the University of Chicago. His thesis, "The equivariant J-homomorphism," was completed under the direction of Professor J.P. May.
Dr. Alica Miller received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Interested in compact Abelian flows (restrictions, skew-products, skew-morphisms, regular almost periodicity), her thesis is titled "Some constructions with compact minimal Abelian flows."
Dr. David Sherman received his Ph.D. from UCLA under the direction of Professor Masamichi Takesaki. His area of specialization is operator algebras, especially the modular theory of von Neumann algebras.
2000-2003 VIGRE Research Assistant Professors:
Dr. Sean Sather-Wagstaff received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, where he has been a University Research Fellow as well as a Teaching Fellow. His thesis advisor was Paul C. Roberts. His research interests are in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, with his main interests in homological conjectures related (directly and indirectly) to Serre's intersection multiplicity.
Dr. Jozef Skokan received his Ph.D. in 2000 from Emory University, Atlanta. His thesis title was "Uniformity of Set Systems." He received an M.S. in applied mathematics from the Czech Technical University in Prague. His research interests are combinatorics - regularity lemma and applications, extremal problems, Ramsey theory; graph theory - colourings; and complex analysis - quasi-conformal mappings.
Dr. Karen Shuman received her Ph.D. in 2000 from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Her thesis title was "Signal Processing Bases and the Jacobi Group.