Karl Schwede Receives Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow Award

Karl Schwede, an assistant professor of mathematics at Penn State University, has been honored with an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow award in recognition of his research accomplishments. Sloan Research Fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in seven fields of science: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.

Schwede's research focuses on a branch of mathematics called algebraic geometry -- the study of geometric objects called algebraic varieties and the equations that define them. This field of study has important applications in cryptography, string theory, and coding theory.

Schwede has published numerous research papers in journals including Advances in Mathematics, the American Journal of Mathematics, Mathematische Annalen, and Algebra and Number Theory. His research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Prior to becoming a Penn State faculty member in 2011, Schwede was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, as well as a researcher at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. From 2004 to 2008, Schwede helped build and maintain the website Situs Geometriae Algebraicae, designed to help students of algebraic geometry find references. He also helped develop and plan the University of Michigan conference "Frobenius splitting in algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, and representation theory" in 2010 as well as a conference at the American Institute of Mathematics in 2011.

In 1999, Schwede earned a bachelor's degree at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. In 2006, Schwede earned a doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Washington, under the direction of Sándor Kovács.