MPS Announces New Scientific Advisory Board Members

The Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of two new members to the Scientific Advisory Board: Hee Oh and Tal Rabin.

Hee Oh’s main areas of research include discrete subgroups of Lie groups, homogeneous dynamics and its connections to number theory and geometry. Oh’s most renowned work is her study with Kontorovich on the distribution of circles of bounded curvature in Apollonian gaskets and related Diophantine problems. Oh’s other fundamental contributions include quantitative decay of matrix coefficients of unitary representations, effective equidistribution of Hecke points to counting rational solutions of Diophantine equations, geometric analogues of the prime number theorem for rational maps, analogues to Selberg’s 3/16 theorem for thin congruence subgroups and the study of orbits of thin groups arising in Diophantine problems. Her more recent collaborative work includes the classification of all possible closures of unipotent flows, and the consequent topological rigidity of geodesic planes, for a class of hyperbolic manifolds of infinite volume. This establishes the first instance of orbit closure theorem à la Ratner in the infinite volume setting.

Oh was awarded the 2015 Satter Prize, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Ho-Am prize in Science, and is an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. She is currently the Vice President of the American Mathematical Society.

Tal Rabin’s research focuses on cryptography and, more specifically, on secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography and proactive security and recently adapting these technologies to the blockchain environment. Her works have been instrumental in forming these areas. She has served as the Program and General Chair of the leading cryptography conferences and as an editor of the Journal of Cryptology. She has initiated and organizes the Women in Theory Workshop, a biennial event for graduate students in Theory of Computer Science. Tal has served as a member of the SIGACT Executive Board and a council member of the Computing Community Consortium.

Tal is an ACM Fellow, an IACR (International Association of Cryptologic Research) Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the 2019 recipient of the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics. She was named by Forbes in 2018 as one of the Top 50 Women in Tech in the world. In 2014 Tal won the Anita Borg Women of Vision Award winner for Innovation and was ranked by Business Insider as the #4 on the 22 Most Powerful Women Engineers.

The 2021 appointees replace Jill Pipher, Brown University and Rebecca Wright, Barnard College.