Professor Mircea Mustaţă was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Mel Hochster Research and Mentoring Award. This new award recognizes a UM Mathematics professor who has made exceptional contributions to the department through their leadership in building a thriving world-class research group. The award provides funding for the recipient’s research group, including support for postdocs and graduate students, seminar speakers and visitors.

Mustaţă joined the UM Mathematics in 2004 as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 2008. Like Hochster, he is an algebraic geometer, studying singularities of algebraic varieties and the role these singularities play in the global geometry of higher-dimensional varieties. His research has involved invariants of singularities such as log canonical thresholds, minimal log discrepancies, multiplier ideals, Bernstein-Sato polynomials, and F-thresholds. During his UM career, he has supervised 15 graduate students who have proceeded to active research careers, including recent Fields’ medalist June Huh. Mustaţă has been recognized as a Simons Fellow, ICM speaker, Packard Fellow, and Clay Research Fellow.

This new award was established by a former mentee of Mel’s who sought a way to honor Mel while helping the department. More than 125 individual donors—including many current and former students and faculty, as well as other admirers—contributed to the Mel Hochster Award campaign, which is still ongoing. The department is grateful for the tremendous support we received from the extended Michigan Math community. Read more about Mel's influence on the mathematics community in this article.