Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow Jennifer Balakrishnan Honored with NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Jennifer Balakrishnan has been given the honor of a 2020 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. An assistant professor at Boston University’s Department of Mathematics & Statistics and a Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow, Jennifer is known for leading a team that solved the “cursed curve,” a Diophantine equation that was “famously difficult” before her solution. Her broad focus concentrates on algorithmic number theory and arithmetic geometry. Additionally, she is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor at BU and a Sloan Research Fellow.

About the Award

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award. Its mission is to support early-career faculty members who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in this particular instance, the progression of mathematics and statistics. 

About Assistant Professor Balakrishnan

Jennifer was born in Mangilao, Guam, where her father is a professor of chemistry at the University of Guam. Later, she graduated from Harvard University with a magna cum laude bachelor’s degree as well as a master’s degree in mathematics. She went on to pursue her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Afterward, she pursued her postdoctoral studies at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. As mentioned previously, her crucial contribution is the solving of the “cursed curve.”

This curve is modeled by the above equation and, as a Diophantine equation, the problem is to identify all the combinations of rational numbers for the variables x, y, and z for which the equation is true.

Jennifer is a Junior Faculty Fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing. The Junior Faculty Fellows program aims to recognize outstanding early-career computational researchers at Boston University and to connect them with one another and with the Hariri Institute community at large. The Steering Committee selects Junior Faculty Fellows through a competitive nomination process for a three-year appointment. 

Congratulations on this honor and continued success, Assistant Professor Balakrishnan.