News updates from the Department of Mathematics for the year 2008.

• Dr. Roman Shterenberg, together with coauthor Dr. Leonid Parnovski, published the paper Asymptotic expansion of the integrated density of states of a two-dimensional periodic Schrödinger operator in Inventiones Mathematicae, widely considered to rank in the top five of all mathematical journals.
• Travis G. Bryant was awarded the O'Neil scholarship. Travis is a double major in mathematics and physics.
• Graduate student Ross Ptacek won the the Kauffman award for excellence in first year graduate studies.
• Junfang Li joined the Faculty as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Li is an expert in geometric analysis, differential geometry, and nonlinear partial differential equations. He rceived his degree in 2006 from the University of Oklahoma under the direction of Shihshu Walter Wei. He then spent a year at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and another at McGill University and the Centre de Recherches MathÈmatiques in Montreal.
• Fast-Track student Luke Stannard won the SIGMAA-Environmental Mathematics award at the MAA Summer MathFest for his talk A Three Stage Model of Mosquitofish Population Dynamics. The award carries a stipend of $150. The award is given to one outstanding undergraduate talk on environmental mathematics. Altogether there were 107 talks and about 15 received awards, mostly honorable mentions from the MAA judges. Luke was mentored by Drs. Mayer and Angus (biology) and by PhD student Clinton Curry.
• The department acknowledges gratefully a $10,000 gift by Dr. and Mrs. O'Neil creating the O'Neil Endowed Scholarship in Mathematics benefiting mathematics students at UAB.
• Fast-track student Pratik Talati has won a prestigious Goldwater scholarship. Nationwide 321 scholarships were awarded.
• PhD student Annette LaRussa will spend eight weeks at the University of Adelaide, Australia, this summer to conduct research on groundwater flow. Her research is sponsored by NSF and the Australian Academy of Sciences.
• Fast-track student Pratik Talati has been awarded the highly prestigious DAAD-RISE scholarship to attend the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, this summer.
• Fast-track students William Bond and Ross Ptacek won $100 for their poster Maximal rotational subsets of the circle under σ_d at the national meeting of the AMS in San Diego, January 2008.