UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Anna Mazzucato, Distinguished Senior Scholar and professor of mathematics at Penn State, has been named a 2023 Simons Fellow in Mathematics by the Simons Foundation. The fellowship provides funds to faculty for a period of academic leave from classroom teaching and administrative duties, enabling recipients to focus solely on research for the long periods often necessary for significant research advances.
Mazzucato will spend the sabbatical leave working on projects related to the behavior of turbulent fluids and the modeling and monitoring of faults in seismology. She plans to visit the University of San Paolo in Brazil, Milan University in Italy, and New York University-Abu Dhabi in the UAE.
Mazzucato’s research focuses on the analysis of partial differential equations and their applications in fluid mechanics and elasticity. She is an expert in continuum mechanics, analysis of partial differential equations, inverse problems, global analysis, analysis on manifolds, harmonic and microlocal analysis, and numerical analysis.
Mazzucato was elected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2021. She was honored with the Teresa Cohen Mathematical Service Award from Penn State in 2019, was named a Distinguished Senior Scholar at Penn State in 2018, and received the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2011. Mazzucato is an editor or associate editor for numerous mathematical journals and is an elected member of the editorial boards committee of the American Mathematical Society.
Mazzucato joined the faculty at Penn State as an assistant professor in 2003, and she was promoted to associate professor in 2009 and to professor in 2013. Prior to that, Mazzucato was Gibbs Instructor at Yale University from 2000 to 2003. She was a postdoctoral associate at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in 2002, a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 2001, and a Liftoff Fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematical physics at the University of Milan in Italy in 1994 and doctoral degree in Mathematics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2000.