The Department of Mathematics recently earned a Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) grant. The three-year, $1 million grant will provide fellowships to several PhD students every year. The first cohort of GAANN Fellows includes: Derya Asaner, Connor Grady, Doron Grossman-Naples, Ryan McConnell, Alex Taylor, and Ken Willyard.

The U.S. Department of Education supports GAANN Fellows in a variety of priority research areas like math, computer science, life sciences, engineering, physical sciences, education, and psychology. Fewer than 60 institutions across the country received GAANN funding in 2024’s grant cycle. 

Typically, doctoral students in mathematics work as teaching assistants to support themselves, but the GAANs Fellowships offer a different opportunity. 

“Fellowship funding is so valuable in freeing students from teaching duties, especially early in their graduate studies and near the end when they are finishing a thesis,” said Karen Mortenen, Associate Director of Graduate Studies. Mortensen leads the grant with Jared Bronski, Director of Graduate Studies.

The Department of Mathematics intends to use the GAANN Fellowships as a recruitment incentive for incoming PhD students and to help students shorten the time it takes to complete their degrees, according to Mortensen. 

“Producing high-quality research requires regular and sustained periods of focused work on the problem, as well as time spent reading relevant papers, speaking to colleagues, and attending seminars in order to maintain a solid understanding of related work in the field. This opportunity to focus entirely on my research is tremendously beneficial at this time in particular, as I head into the second half of my sixth and penultimate year of grad school,” Doron Grossman-Naples, a new GAANN Fellow whose advisor is Professor Charles Rezk, said.

Grossman-Naples studies elliptic cohomology with level structure. The state of the art in elliptic cohomology with level structure “is a rather unsatisfactory state of affairs,” Grossman-Naples said. It only includes “level N structure when N has a multiplicative inverse. In particular, if you want all possible level structures, you have to invert everything and work over the rational numbers [and] rational homotopy theory misses a lot of information.”

The Department of Mathematics also won a GAANN grant in 2015. Twenty-one students received GAANN Fellowships during that grant cycle

Freeing Students to Focus

The GAANN Fellowships are a boon to the department – freeing students to focus deeply on their research – and to the field more broadly. Fellows who were a part of the Department of Mathematics’ 2015-2018 GAANN award are now having terrific impact in a variety of areas.

• William Balderrama is a postdoc at the University of Bonn. He is the author or co-author of 13 research papers in homotopy theory.
• Cara Monical studied combinatorics and earned recognition for her teaching while at Illinois. She is now at Sandia National Laboratories, where she was awarded her first patent in 2023.
• Dana Neidmann received an MS in the Teaching of Mathematics along with his PhD at Illinois. He is now a professor at Centre College, where he explores the interplay between graph theory and number theory.
• Colleen Robichaux is a Hedrick Adjunct Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Los Angeles, focusing on algebraic combinatorics and Schubert calculus.