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• Congratulations to Ariel Barton who was awarded the 2010 Kowalsky Fellowship. Ariel, a student of Carlos Kenig, studies elliptic PDE. The Kowalsky Fellowship provides support for a graduate student, preferably a woman, during the year when she is expected to complete a dissertation. The award is established through a bequest from Walter and Yvonne Kowalsky in memory of their daughter Nadine Kowalsky, who died of leukemia in 1996. Nadine graduated from the University of Chicago in 1994 with a dissertation directed by Robert Zimmer.


• Congratulations to Hannah Alpert who was selected to receive the 2010 Alice T. Schafer prize. The Alice T. Schafer prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman was established in 1990 by the AWM. For more information about the prize, please see here


• It is with regret that we report the passing of Alice T Schafer, MS `40, PhD'42, who died September 27, 2009, at the age of 94.
  
  Schafer was one of the founding members and the second president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), which later named in her honor its annual award for the outstanding undergraduate woman majoring in mathematics. Known as a champion of women in mathematics, she received the Mathematical Association of America's 1998 award for distinguished service to mathematics. In 1985 she was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
  
  Schafer came to Chicago in 1939, studied projective differential geometry under E.P. Lane, and completed her dissertation on Singularities of Space Curves. After her marriage to fellow graduate student Richard D. Schafer, PhD '42, and the conferral of her doctorate, Schafer taught at Connecticut College, The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the University of Michigan, Douglass College, Swarthmore College, Drexel Institute of Technology, and the University of Connecticut. In 1962, Schafer was appointed to Wellesley College, where she became Head of Mathematics. Following her 1980 retirement from Wellesley, she continued to teach at Simmons College and Marymount University until she was eighty-one years old.
  
  Schafer is survived by her husband Richard, professor emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  
  Read more about the life of Alice T. Schafer at the Boston Globe (link) and at the Wellesley College website (link).

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