Newswise — Andrew Toms of Purdue University has been awarded the prestigious AMS Centennial Fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The fellowship is presented annually to outstanding mathematicians who have held the doctoral degree for between three and twelve years. The primary selection criterion is excellence in research achievement. The stipend for the 2011-2012 Centennial Fellowship is US$79,000, plus an expense allowance of US$7,900. Fellows also receive a complimentary one-year AMS membership.
Andrew Toms was born in Montréal and raised in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. He attended Queen's University in Kingston as an undergraduate and pursued his doctoral studies under the supervision of George Elliott at the University of Toronto. After a brief stint as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow in Copenhagen and at the Fields Institute, he took up an assistant professorship at the University of New Brunswick. A move to York University followed in 2006; he has been associate professor at Purdue University since August of 2010.
Toms's research focuses on the structure and invariants of operator algebras and their connections to dynamics, topology, and descriptive set theory. He is particularly interested in deciding when C*-algebras are determined by their K-theory, especially those that arise from topological dynamical systems.
In the coming year Toms will travel to Copenhagen and Toronto to further a collaborative project with Ilijas Farah and Asger Törnquist that aims to determine the Borel complexity of natural classes of C*-algebras (extending their existing work on nuclear algebras). He will also travel to Münster to continue his collaboration with Wilhelm Winter on characterizing classifiable nuclear C*-algebras in terms of algebraic, homological, and topological regularity properties.
Find out more about AMS and AMS-affiliated prizes athttp://www.ams.org/profession/prizes-awards/prizes.
Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the 30,000-member American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.
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