Group theorist Yash Lodha (Ph.D., 2015) has been awarded the START Prize by the Austrian Science Fund FWF. This award gives young researchers the opportunity to plan research over an extended period and with a high degree of financial security. It is one of Austria's most prestigious and most highly endowed awards alongside the Wittgenstein Award.
Lodha's project “Algebraic, analytic and dynamical properties of group actions” addresses topics of group theory, a central area of mathematics. The project involves work at the intersection of topology and combinatorics and aims at finding new, basic insights into the geometrical and algebraic symmetry structures presented in groups.
Since graduating from Cornell, Lodha has pursued postdoc studies at EPF Lausanne in Switzerland, served as principal investigator in an “Ambition” research project of the Swiss National Fund SNF, and was Research Fellow at the Center for Mathematical Challenges at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study in Seoul. His scientific achievements include the development of a new approach towards solving the Neumann Day problem for finitely presented groups, which he published in 2013 together with his advisor Justin Tatch Moore.
You can read a brief interview with Dr. Lodha, published on the Scilog website.
