NEWS Mathematics People Union. She is also a member of the board of the College Toro Awarded Assistant Migrant Program (CAMP) at the University of Washington. This program is federally funded through Blackwell–Tapia Prize the US Department of Education’s Office of Migrant Edu- Tatiana Toro of the University cation. It is designed to outreach to and support students of Washington, Seattle, has been from migrant and seasonal farmworker families during awarded the 2020 Blackwell–Tapia their first year in college. Inspired by the CAMP students, Prize. The prize honors excellence Toro spearheaded an effort to launch the first Latinx in in research among people who have the Mathematical Sciences Conference (LATMATH). This promoted diversity within the math- conference took place at IPAM in April 2015. Participants ematical and statistical sciences. included high school students, undergraduate students, The prize citation reads in part: graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty, and “Toro is an analyst whose work lies researchers in industry and government. In 2018 she co- Tatiana Toro at the interface of geometric measure organized the second Latinx in the Mathematical Sciences theory, harmonic analysis, and par- Conference funded through the Mathematical Sciences tial differential equations. Her work focuses on understand- Institutes Diversity initiative. This conference attracted over ing mathematical questions that arise in an environment 250 participants.” where the known data are very rough. The main premise Toro was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and received her of her work is that under the right lens, objects, which at PhD from Stanford University in 1992 under the direction first glance might appear to be very irregular, do exhibit of Leon Simon. She held positions at the University of quantifiable regular characteristics. With collaborators, she California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago before introduced a new framework to study boundary regularity joining the University of Washington. She has been a mem- questions for second-order partial differential operators. ber of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) They laid the foundation for what has become a new, rap- in Berkeley, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced idly developing area within PDEs. They also brought tools Study of Harvard University, and Chancellor Professor at from geometric measure theory to study basic questions UC Berkeley. She has held two Alfred P. Sloan Foundation about the structure of harmonic measure. Their ideas have Fellowships, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and provided a new and original approach to understanding two Simons Foundation Fellowships. She received the the relationship between the geometry of a domain and the Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award from the regularity at the boundary of the solutions to second-order University of Washington in 2019. She is a Fellow of the partial differential equations. “Her professional service is a multidimensional en- AMS. She is an elected member of the American Academy deavor. It includes service to the mathematical community of Arts and Sciences and a Miembro Correspondiente de at large, mentoring at different levels of the academic lad- la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y der, and outreach to elementary schools. Her commitment Naturales. Toro was an invited speaker at the 2010 Inter- toward addressing issues of equity and underrepresentation national Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India. of certain groups in the mathematical sciences is a guid- She delivered an invited address at the Joint Mathematics ing principle in each one of these settings. She serves as a Meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2011 and the member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Pure NAM Clayton–Woodard Lecture at the Joint Mathematics and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA, a member of Meetings in Seattle in 2016. In 2020 she was the inaugural the Board of Directors of the Banff International Research AMS Mirzakhani Lecture speaker at the Joint Mathematics Station (BIRS), and as cochair of the Scientific Advisory Meetings in Denver, Colorado. She tells the Notices: “I am Committee of MSRI in Berkeley. She is a member of the a swimmer. I have two kids (seventeen and twenty-two), US National Committee for the International Mathematical two dogs, two cats, and a husband, also a mathematician.” 1406 NOTICES OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY VOLUME 67, NUMBER 9 Mathematics People NEWS The Blackwell–Tapia Prize and Conference honor David Codá Marques and his wife, Ana, have two children, Pedro Blackwell, the first African American to be elected to the and Luisa. National Academy of Sciences, and Richard Tapia, recipient Zhiwei Yun of the Massachusetts of the National Medal of Science in 2010. The prize recog- Institute of Technology works at the nizes a mathematician who has contributed significantly to intersection of representation the- research in his or her area of expertise and who has served ory, algebraic geometry, and number as a role model for mathematical scientists and students theory. He uses ideas and techniques from underrepresented minority groups or has contributed from geometry to solve problems in in other significant ways to addressing the problem of un- group representations and number derrepresentation of minorities in math. theory. He has constructed the first examples of motives of type E7 and —Blackwell–Tapia Conference announcement Zhiwei Yun E8 and solved a related inverse Ga- lois problem. In joint work with Wei Zhang, he has given a geometric interpretation of higher Simons Foundation derivatives of L-functions for function fields. Investigators Named Theoretical Computer Science Venkatesan Guruswami of Carnegie The Simons Foundation has named the Simons Founda- Mellon University conducts research tion Investigators for 2020. Following are the investigators that has led to major advances in whose work involves the mathematical sciences. the theory of error-correcting codes, approximate optimization, pseu- Mathematics dorandomness, and related com- Alexei Borodin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- plexity-theoretic and mathematical ogy studies problems on the interface of representation aspects. His work on list decoding theory and probability that link to combinatorics, random has yielded codes with minimum matrix theory, and integrable systems. His most recent Venkatesan possible redundancy for correcting work carries over the ideas and techniques of the theory of Guruswami worst-case errors. His recent works symmetric functions to solvable lattice models of statistical include notable progress on polar physics. codes, deletion-correcting codes, codes for cloud storage, Ciprian Manolescu of Stanford and constraint satisfaction problems. He tells the Notices University works in low-dimensional that, in his (sadly limited) spare time, he enjoys traveling, topology and gauge theory. His re- ethnic vegetarian food, racquet sports, crime thrillers, and search is centered on constructing Carnatic (south Indian classical) music. new versions of Floer homology and Omer Reingold of Stanford Uni- versity conducts research in the foun- applying them to questions in topol- dations of computer science and, ogy. With collaborators, he showed most notably, in computational com- that many Floer-theoretic invari- plexity, cryptography, and the socie- ants are algorithmically computable. tal impact of computation. Among Ciprian Manolescu He also developed a new variant his fundamental contributions are of Seiberg–Witten Floer homology, small-memory deterministic graph which he used to prove the existence of nontriangulable walks, explicit constructions of loss- manifolds in high dimensions. Omer Reingold less expander graphs, randomness Fernando Codá Marques of extractors, and pseudorandom func- Princeton University is a geometer. tions, as well as establishing influential notions in the area His recent work, in collaboration of algorithmic fairness. He is a Fellow of the Association with André Neves, developed a full for Computing Machinery (ACM). His honors include the Morse theory for the area functional 2005 Grace Murray Hopper Award and the 2009 Gödel in closed Riemannian manifolds. Prize. He tells the Notices: “I [have] had an ongoing involve- The ideas introduced by them have ment with theater since my days as a theater major in Talma revitalized the subject, leading to the Yalin arts high school many years ago. In the last couple Fernando discovery that closed minimal sur- of decades I was part of both scripted theater troupes as Codá Marques faces are ubiquitous in these spaces. well as playback theater troupes. Playback theater is a form OCTOBER 2020 NOTICES OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY 1407 Mathematics People NEWS of improvisational theater based on true stories from the Award committee, organizer and regular contributor of audience. Very recently [I was] appointed to be the artistic annual meetings, cofounder of the CAIMS/SCMAI jour- director of the Yanshufim playback troupe and teaching nal Mathematics in Science and Industry, for spearheading playback theater at Stanford as part of the [computer sci- improvements to CAIMS/SCMAI operations, and for ence] department to enhance students’ collaboration and research capabilities.” his leadership as president-elect, president, and past- David Woodruff of Carnegie Mellon University works in president.” Spiteri received his PhD from the University