Greta Panova, associate professor at the University of Southern California, is the recipient of the IMI Prize for 2020.
Greta Panova was born in Sofia. She graduated from the National High-School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences in Sofia “Acad. Lyubomir Chakalov”. As a high-school student, she participated in three International Math Olympiads (1999 in Romania, 2000 in South Korea, 2001 in the USA) and won two silver and one gold medal.
She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 with a Bachelor’s degree, received a Master’s degree from the University of California Berkeley in 2006, and finished her Ph.D. at Harvard in 2011 under the supervision of Richard Stanley.
In 2011, Greta Panova received a Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California Los Angeles, intermittently she was also a postdoc at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley) in 2012. In 2014 she became an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2018. Since 2018, she has been an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. In 2017-2018 she was a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has also held invited Visiting Professorship positions at Institute Henry Poincare (Paris) in 2017, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing (Berkeley) in 2018 and Mittag-Leffler Institute (Stockholm) in 2020.
Throughout her studies and career, she has been a recipient of National Science Foundation awards, research fellowships, and other awards, including a third prize at the Putnam competition as an undergraduate and the best student paper award at the Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics Conference (Reykjavik, 2011). Besides the visiting positions, she has been a plenary speaker at the Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics conference (London, 2017), Algebraic and Enumerative Combinatorics in Okayama conference (Japan, 2018), Graduate Combinatorics Conference at Max-Planck Institute in Leipzig (Germany, 2019) and several regional Combinatorics conferences.
Greta Panova works in the area of Algebraic Combinatorics and its applications in Computational Complexity Theory, Probability, and Statistical Mechanics. She has about 40 papers, among them publications in the Journal of the AMS, Advances in Mathematics, Annals of Probability. Many of results concern representation-theoretic multiplicities (notably the Kronecker coefficients of the symmetric group) and their use in the Geometric Complexity Theory for the study of computational lower and the separation of computational complexity classes, in particular disproving some of the main conjectures in the approach to proving the algebraic version of P vs NP. She has also applied symmetric function theory and other algebraic and combinatorial tools to reveal the limiting probabilistic behavior of dimer models in Statistical Mechanics.
The IMI Prize will be presented during the International Conference “Mathematics Days of in Sofia” in 2021.
