Heather Russell, associate professor of mathematics, received the 2026 School of Arts & Sciences (A&S) Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. The award recognizes A&S faculty members who have accumulated an exemplary record in mentoring students working on research and creative projects outside of the classroom.
Faculty Accomplishments
Tianyuan Xu, assistant professor of mathematics & statistics, published "Branching rules of minuscule representations via a new partial order" in Combinatorial Theory.
Courtney Blondino, assistant professor of health studies, and Joanna Wares, associate professor of mathematics, published "Beyond MAT Expansion: A Mathematical Modeling Analysis of Opioid Use Disorder Intervention Efficacy" in Mathematical Biosciences along with Maniha Akram, ’24.
Bill Ross, professor of mathematics, published The Wonders of the Cesàro Operator. The graduate-level book surveys the classical Cesàro operator, covering its history, properties, and modern generalizations.
Taylor Arnold, professor of data science and statistics, and Lauren Tilton, professor of digital humanities and director of UR’s Center for Liberal Arts and AI, received a grant to support their research to develop AI models that analyze film and television. The funding is part of a larger award from Schmidt Sciences and includes collaboration with colleagues at UC Berkeley and Bowdoin College.
Tianyuan Xu, assistant professor of mathematics & statistics, presented his research on orthogonal roots at The Interplay Between Distance Geometry, Combinatorics, and Coding Theory workshop held at the Brin Mathematics Research Center at the University of Maryland.
Marcella Torres, teaching faculty of mathematics, and Shannon Jones, senior teaching faculty of biology, along with students Aamy Bakry, '24, and Emma Brashear, '27, published "Development of a mathematical model of the innate immune response to inhaled toxicants" in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
Tianyuan Xu, assistant professor of mathematics & statistics, is a recipient of the AMS-Simons Research Enhancement Grants for Primarily Undergraduate Institution (PUI) Faculty. The grant supports Xu’s research in combinatorial representation theory.
Tianyuan Xu, assistant professor of mathematics & statistics, published "Orthogonal roots, Macdonald representations, and quasiparabolic sets" in Forum of Mathematics.
Heather M. Russell, associate professor of mathematics published "Runs and RSK Tableaux of Boolean Permutations" in Annals of Combinatorics.