Asaf Cohen joined the UM Mathematics Department in 2019 as an Assistant Professor. He received his PhD in Probability and Statistics from Tel-Aviv University in 2013, under the direction of Eilon Solan. Professor Cohen was a Postdoc Assistant Professor at UM from 2014-2017, and an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Haifa from 2017-2019. Professor Cohen’s research interests are in applied probability, stochastic processes, and control theory. Specifically, he focuses on mean-field games, mathematical finance and actuary, diffusion scale and large deviation scale analysis of stochastic control problems and games. His work has included machine learning, model uncertainty, risk-sensitive control, heavy traffic regimes, and partial differential equations techniques in stochastic control and differential games.

Alex Wright joined the UM Mathematics Department in 2019 as an Assistant Professor. He received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Chicago under the direction of Alex Eskin. He received a Clay Research Fellowship in 2014, and held positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Stanford University. Professor Wright studies geometry and dynamics, especially on moduli spaces, and special families of algebraic curves that arise in this context. His other areas of interest include Teichmüller theory and ergodic theory on homogeneous spaces.  Recently he was awarded the Michael Brin Dynamical Systems Prize for Young Mathematicians from Penn State University. The prize is given bi-annually to recognize outstanding contributions to dynamical systems made by researchers within four years of their PhD. In addition, in Professor Wright received the 2019 Levi L. Conant Prize from the American Mathematical Society (AMS). He is being recognized for his article “From rational billiards to dynamics on moduli spaces” published in 2016 in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (Vol. 53, pp. 41-56). The Conant Prize is awarded annually and recognizes the best expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years