PRIMES: Program Staff

Chief Research Advisor / Math Track Faculty Coordinator

Pavel Etingof is Professor of Mathematics in the Mathematics Department at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University in 1994, under Igor Frenkel . He taught at Harvard as a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor in 1994-1999, joined the MIT mathematics faculty as an assistant professor in 1998, and became a full professor in 2005. Professor Etingof's research interests are noncommutative algebra, representation theory, mathematical physics. He served as Director of Graduate Studies at the MIT mathematics department in 2002-2007. Professor Etingof has led mathematics research programs for high school students at the Clay Mathematics Research Academy in 2004 and 2005, and suggested and supervised 10 high school research projects at the Research Science Institute (RSI) at MIT.

Program Director

Slava Gerovitch is Lecturer in History of Mathematics and Director of Research and Reading Programs in the Mathematics Department at MIT. He has received a Master's degree in applied mathematics and a PhD in history and social study of science from MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program, under Loren Graham . He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics . Dr. Gerovitch's research interests are history of mathematics, cybernetics, and computing; space history and space policy; and history of Russian and Soviet science and technology. The courses he taught at MIT include history of science , history of computing , and cultural history of mathematics . His current research project is on social history of Soviet mathematics .

Computer Science Section Faculty Coordinator

Srini Devadas is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. His research interests include computer security, computer architecture, computer-aided design of VLSI circuits, formal verification, and computational biology. He has written numerous papers in these areas, and co-authored four books on CAD. He has served on the technical program committees of several conferences, as an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation , and serves on the editorial board of other journals. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He served as the chair of Area II (Computer Science Graduate Program) in 2003-2005, and as the Research Director of Architecture, Systems and Networking within CSAIL in 2003-2005. He served as Associate Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with responsibility for Computer Science in 2005-2011.

Computational Biology Section Faculty Coordinator

Leonid Mirny is Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Physics at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology . He is a member of the MIT Physical Science-Oncology Center: Single-Cell Dynamics in Cancer . Professor Mirny's research focuses on problems in biophysics, bioinformatics, and genomics. His recent study uses fractal theory to reconstruct the architecture of the human genome.

Head Mentor

Tanya Khovanova is Lecturer in the Mathematics Department at MIT. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Moscow State University in 1988, under Israel Gelfand . Her research was in representation theory, integrable systems, quantum groups, and superstring theory. Currently she is interested in combinatorics and recreational mathematics. Dr. Khovanova is also Menezes Challenge Mentor in the MathROOTS program and head mentor in the Math section of MIT's Research Science Institute (RSI) . She has created the popular Number Gossip site.

Group Research Coordinator

Felix Gotti is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and an Instructor in Applied Mathematics in the Mathematics Department at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2019 under Prof. Lauren Williams. Dr. Gotti's research primarily focuses on algebraic combinatorics and commutative ring theory. He is currently interested in subdivisions of polytopes and atomic decompositions in integral domains. Recent courses he has taught include combinatorial analysis and multiplicative ideal theory. Dr. Gotti also supervises research projects in CrowdMath , a joint initiative of MIT PRIMES and Art of Problem Solving.

PRIMES Circle Section Coordinators

Marisa Gaetz is a PhD student in the Mathematics department at MIT, where her studies center around representation theory and Lie theory. She was also an undergraduate at MIT, graduating in 2020. As an undergraduate at MIT, Marisa was a PRIMES Circle mentor for three years. As a grad student, she was a Directed Reading Program mentor in 2021, and she has continued working with PRIMES Circle, serving as a coordinator since Spring 2021. She is a recipient of MIT's 2021 MLK Leadership Award for her efforts to improve diversity and inclusivity within the math community.

Mary Stelow is a PhD student in the department of mathematics at MIT. Her research interests are in gauge theory, Floer theory, and low dimensional topology. She has been co-coordinator of PRIMES Circle since 2021, and has also mentored for RSI. She has also mentored DRP students at MIT and is a co-chair of the Grad-Undergrad Math Mentoring Initiative at MIT.

Yulia's Dream Program Coordinator

Dmytro Matvieievskyi is a Ph.D. student in the Mathematics department at Northeastern University. He got his bachelor's degree from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in 2012. Dmytro's research is centered around geometric representation theory, the most recent projects studying the theory of unipotent representations.

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at