The Department of Mathematics would like to welcome our new faculty members, many of whom have already began teaching for us this Fall semester. Representing a wide range of research interests and experiences, we are excited to see their contributions to the continued growth and development of our department.

 

Ben Castle, assistant professor, is a mathematical logician specializing in model theory and its interactions with algebra, geometry, and combinatorics. Before coming to Illinois, Castle held postdoctoral positions at the Fields Institute, Notre Dame University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the University of Maryland; during this time, his work focused on studying reconstruction theorems in geometry from a model-theoretic lens. He holds a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley.

 

William Chen, assistant professor, studies the arithmetic and geometry of noncongruence subgroups of SL(2,Z), and its relation to Hurwitz stacks, Teichmuller dynamics, and combinatorial group theory. Before coming to Illinois, Chen has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University.

 

Lena Ji, assistant professor, is an algebraic geometer who studies problems related to Fano varieties, rationality, and connections to arithmetic geometry. Most recently, Ji was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University.

 

Abhishek Methuku, assistant professor, works on solving problems in Combinatorics using probabilistic methods and tools from other areas. His work involves developing semi-random methods and new tools for applying expanders to solve graph embedding problems for sparse graphs. His research includes the resolution of several longstanding problems of Erdős such as the celebrated Erdős-Faber-Lovász conjecture for which he received the 2024 Frontiers of Science Award in Mathematics awarded by the International Congress of Basic Sciences. Before coming to UIUC, he was a research fellow at ETH Zürich. He received his PhD from Central European University in Budapest.

 

Polly Yu, assistant professor, is an applied mathematician who looks for generalizable principles to chemistry and biology. To study the dynamics arising from chemical/biological systems, she uses tools from graph theory and algebra in additional to numerical and symbolic computations. Before coming to Illinois, Yu was an independent postdoctoral fellow at the NSF-Simons Center for Mathematical & Statistical Analysis of Biology at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

Eric Chen, assistant professor, works in geometric analysis on geometric flows such as the Ricci flow as well as conformal geometry. Most recently, Chen was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Chen was also the Ky Fan visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University. He will join the department in Spring 2025.