On Thursday September 4, 2025, the Department of Mathematics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign held its Fall 2025 Department meeting. This meeting coincided with a number of exciting changes including the department’s relocation to Harker Hall while Altgeld Hall is under renovation. The department also welcomed seven new postdocs for academic year 2025-2026: Nicolas Chavarria Gomez, Ruben Louis, Itamar Mor, Theshani Nuradha Piliththuwasam Gallage, Eve Shaw, Hewan Shemtaga, Julia Stadlmann; and announced that the department has opened a hiring search for a new faculty member.
The Department of Mathematics has had fourteen new faculty hires from six searches in the past four years, including six women. While having only one new faculty search may seem like a reduction, only fifteen total new searches were approved across the entire College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. This search is an open-rank open-area search with the possibility of recruiting into the D’Angelo Endowed Chair position.
This search will be an integral part of Department Chair Vera Mikyoung Hur’s goal of “ensuring continued excellence” for the 2025-2025 academic year. If selected for the D’Angelo Endowed Chair position, this will mark the first endowed chair for the department. Currently, the department has three endowed professorships, the most recent being Jake Rasmussen whose research has focused largely on knots within the fields of geometry and topology.
Professorship and chair endowments allow the department to recognize distinguished mathematicians. The endowment will provide them stability for their research and continued support of the department and will ensure that their research will remain funded throughout their career. This open search is an opportunity for a mathematician of outstanding talent to join our already strong department.