Bjorn Poonen

Bjorn Poonen is the current Distinguished Professor in Science at MIT. Before arriving at MIT in 2008, he received an A.B. from Harvard and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and then held academic positions at MSRI, Princeton, and Berkeley. Poonen’s research lies principally in number theory and algebraic geometry. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the AMS. His awards include the AMS Doob prize, the Chauvenet Prize for exposition, the MIT School of Science Prize in Undergraduate Teaching, a Simons Investigatorship, a Miller Professorship, and the Guggenheim, Packard, Rosenbaum, Simons, and Sloan Fellowships. He was a principal investigator in the Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation, and he served for 14 years as founding managing editor of Algebra & Number Theory. Twenty-seven mathematicians have received a Ph.D. under his supervision.