Following a competitive process, AARMS has awarded two $5,000 graduate student scholarships to recognize the brightest young mathematical scientists in the region. This year’s winners are Shivam Arora, PhD student at Memorial University supervised by Eduardo Martinez-Pedroza, and Deni Salj, Masters student at Dalhousie, supervised by Dorette Pronk.

Shivam Arora‘s area of specialization is in geometric group theory. He is currently finishing his fourth year in the PhD program at Memorial University.

Most of his work at Memorial has been on generalizing results from discrete groups to the larger class of totally disconnected locally compact groups. More specifically, he studies topological groups that admit nice actions on non-positively curved spaces, and uses geometric and cohomological techniques to understand  their subgroups.  His results have been published in top journals, and he has been an active participant in local and international research conferences and workshops where he has contributed a number of short talks. Shivam also has a good record of assisting in outreach activities promoting science in St. John’s.  His other interests include mathematical foundations of Neural networks, and he is a co-founder and machine learning engineer for a local start-up called Inverte in St. John’s.

Deni Salja started his research career at the University of Calgary where he studied topological data analysis (TDA) under the supervision of Dr. Kristine Bauer. He was initially interested in how geometry and topology, and general abstract theories of shapes and spaces, could be applied to solve real world problems such as analayzing highly dimensional data sets. More recently Deni has been studying category theory and in his undergraduate research with Dr. Bauer he used a categorical notion of finite-difference operators called ‘change-action derivatives’ to describe the so-called persistence diagrams of a tool called persistent homology under the TDA umbrella. In his current research at Dalhousie University, under the supervision of Dr. Pronk.