The Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign would like to congratulate two of our alumni, Michelle Delcourt and Anton Bernshteyn, for being two of 126 scholars who received the 2025 Sloan Fellowships. This prestigious award is granted to the most promising early-career researchers in fields of Mathematics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Earth System Science, Economics, Neuroscience, and Physics.
Michelle Delcourt earned her PhD at Illinois as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in 2017 and is currently an Associate Professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University. During her time at Illinois, Delcourt served as the Outreach Manager for the Illinois Mathematics Lab and as president for the Association for Women in Mathematics. With Professor Jozsef Balogh as her advisor, Delcourt took a strong interest in combinatorics and graph theory stating, “You can’t leave Illinois without being tangentially aware of the Four Color Theorem.” Her research focuses on extremal combinatorics and structural graph theory; amongst other topics she has worked on Hadwiger's Conjecture, a generalization of the Four Color Theorem.
Her work is related to a variety of areas including graph coloring, number theory, and randomized algorithms. Over the years she has developed new techniques and resolved substantial open problems including the (k+2, k)-Problem of Brown, Erdős, and Sós, the High Girth Existence Conjecture, and a new proof of the famous Existence Conjecture for Combinatorial Designs. She currently also has the best-known partial progress towards a number of fundamental questions in graph coloring, including Hadwiger’s Conjecture, Reed’s Conjecture, and Nash-Williams’ Conjecture. Some of these are old and storied questions that have prompted much work over the years and are widely considered to be amongst the hardest and most central open problems in graph theory.
Delcourt encourages students to take advantage of the many resources available at Illinois including the library which is full of “hidden gems”, the department’s seminars and colloquiums, and the high variety and number of advanced courses taught by experts in their field which she described as “interesting courses taught by talented people.”
Anton Bernshteyn earned his PhD at Illinois in 2018 and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. During his time at Illinois, Bernshteyn became particularly interested in the intersection between the mathematical fields of combinatorics and mathematical logic, specifically descriptive set theory. His work with his advisors Anush Tserunyan in Logic and Alexandr Kostochka in Combinatorics was formative in his career. Bernshteyn states that the “atmosphere in the department was extremely helpful in setting up this interdisciplinary mindset that informs a lot of my work now.”
Bernshteyn continues his research at the interface of set theory and combinatorics, and aims to use this interdisciplinary approach to develop tools that can be applied in other areas, such as dynamical systems and computer science. In his words, “It is exciting to see researchers learning tools and techniques across disciplines. I look forward to helping to train the next generation of mathematicians who are experts in more than one area. I am excited for the opportunity to create new connections between different ideas and communities, to bring different parts of math together, and to see students grow.”