Tudor Dimofte Wins NSF CAREER Award

Tudor Dan Dimofte, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, has received a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program supports junior faculty who perform outstanding research, are excellent educators, and integrate outreach in their work.

Dimofte’s research seeks to solve problems in physics using mathematics, and vice versa. For example, Dimofte investigates geometric structures that can reveal the underlying workings of supersymmetry, which proposes that every elementary particle (like electrons and quarks) has a “superpartner” with a different quantum mechanical spin. He was awarded $400,000 over five years to combine physical and mathematical approaches to uncover new structures in supersymmetric gauge theory and geometric representation theory.

Dimofte was a founding member of the UC Davis Center for Quantum Mathematics and Physics, and was named a Hellman Fellow in 2017. He majored in mathematics at Princeton University and received a doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology. He was also a postdoc in Cambridge (U.K.), at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and most recently at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Dimofte joined the UC Davis faculty in 2016.

— Becky Oskin, content strategist in the College of Letters and Science