Default | NEWS

5/7/2009

Brendan Hassett named Duncan winner

BY KEN FOUNTAIN
Special to the Rice News

For mathematics professor Brendan Hassett, winning the 2009 Charles W. Duncan Jr. Achievement Award for Outstanding Faculty is not only an individual achievement but a recognition by his colleagues from across Rice University that his department is doing great things.

“As mathematicians, we always feel that we have to work to explain what we do,” said Hassett, adding that unlike other sciences, it often takes many years for advances in mathematical theory to work their way into practical applications.

	BRENDAN HASSETT

“I’m really gratified that my colleagues, both in the department and the university at large, recognize the things that we’re doing in this department, and that they’re excited about them,” he said.

The Duncan Award is open to tenure-track or tenured members of the faculty with fewer than 10 years of experience and honors outstanding achievement in both scholarship and teaching. It includes a $5,000 prize.

Growing up, Hassett considered studying physics before deciding on mathematics. He received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a doctorate from Harvard University. His research areas are algebraic geometry – the geometry of solutions to algebraic equations – and number theory.

Hassett served as a postdoctoral instructor at the University of Chicago from 1996 to 2000, when he first interviewed at Rice. He spent the next year as a visiting scholar at the Chinese University in Hong Kong before arriving at Rice in 2001.

Hassett teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, although he’s currently on sabbatical.

“For a mathematician, I have a fairly large research group, although it is not as large by the standards of the experimental sciences," he said. "I currently have five graduate students and two postdocs, and over the last few years I’ve advised about 20 undergraduate research students. So while I haven’t been here that long, a fairly large number of young people have been involved in my research.”

Another of the department's educational missions that Hassett is involved in is a three-year program called the Evans Instructors, which is for newly minted Ph.D.’s who are still in the process of being trained as professors.

“There’s a sort of intermediate stage between being students and being independent faculty," he said. "One of the things that’s really important is for them to have people to interact with and to talk to while they’re here.”

Hassett said finding a way to help individual students from a diverse set of educational and geographical backgrounds make their way through the system is one of the most difficult, but also one of the most rewarding, aspects of his job.

“I think listening to students and getting a sense of both what their strengths and weaknesses are and also what their long-term aspirations are is really important to developing an appropriate plan for their education,” he said.

Hassett said that people outside academia often perceive graduate programs as “giant cloning machines” that exist to perpetuate the faculty that run them. He said while he can understand that criticism, he doesn’t think it’s valid for his department.

“We know from statistics that most students after graduation are going to be doing something different from what the faculty here are doing," he said. "So we try to think very carefully about how to give them opportunities to get them where they want to go.”

During his sabbatical, Hassett has been serving as one of the organizers of a program on algebraic geometry at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif., which began in January and ends May 22. The program gathers many of the discipline’s experts from around the world to work on research problems of common interest.

“Things like this really contribute to the overall research infrastructure in the area. It helps younger people -- students and postdoctoral fellows -- to get access to leaders in the field. It also helps the older people to know what’s going on, to know what the younger people are doing,” he said.

While emphasizing that the entire department shares in the credit bestowed by his winning the Duncan Award, Hassett did take some individual pride.

“In any organization, you work long and hard, and you’re never sure whether what you’re doing is recognized," he said. "It’s really gratifying to get this award."