Jesse Peterson Named Chancellor Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor of Mathematics Jesse Peterson is one of 12 outstanding Vanderbilt University faculty members who have been named to the 2017 class of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. The class comprises highly accomplished, recently tenured faculty from mathematics, engineering, and law, as well as the social sciences, life and physical sciences, clinical sciences, and humanities.
Peterson and the other faculty members will hold the title of Chancellor Faculty Fellow for two years and will be supported by an unrestricted allocation of $40,000 a year for two fiscal years beginning July 1. The funds can be used to support innovative research, scholarship, and creative expression activities that will further propel the career of the awardee. The Chancellor Faculty Fellows also will meet as a group during the course of their awards to exchange ideas on teaching and research, building a broader intellectual community that advances trans-institutional scholarship.
Peterson joined the Department of Mathematics in the fall of 2008. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006 under the direction of Sorin Popa. His previous honors include a Liftoff Fellowship from the Clay Mathematics Institute, an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Peterson?s primary research interest lies in the area of von Neumann algebras and their applications to related fields such as group theory and orbit equivalence ergodic theory. He is a member of the department?s Noncommutative Geometry and Operator Algebras research group and a co-organizer of the weekly Subfactor Seminar as well as of the annual Noncommutative Geometry and Operator Algebras Spring Institute held at Vanderbilt in May.
According to Dietmar Bisch, former chair of the department who nominated Peterson for the Chancellor Faculty Fellows program, “Jesse is a leading researcher in the theory of von Neumann algebras. His contributions to the field are profound and original, and he has already mentored several highly successful postdoctoral fellows and Ph.D. students. We are thrilled to have him as a colleague.?
The Chancellor Faculty Fellows program was launched in September 2014 under the Trans-Institutional Programs, or TIPs, initiative to support outstanding faculty who have recently received tenure. The TIPs Council reviewed and made final recommendations on the nominations received for the 2017 class.
A list of all 12 Chancellor Faculty Fellows for 2017 is available here.