Mathematics department welcomes new faculty for fall 2025
The Department of Mathematics welcomes its newest tenure-line faculty members.
Jonathan DeWitt, assistant professor of mathematics, specializes in the area of dynamical systems. In particular, he is interested in understanding the chaotic behavior in dynamical systems. Such behavior often manifests in strong statistical properties: the system may rapidly mix or satisfy a central limit theorem.
DeWitt’s previous awards include a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2022 and a Wirszup Prize from the University of Chicago, also in 2022. His research has been published in journals such as Journal of Modern Dynamics, Journal of the European Mathematical Society, and Geometric and Functional Analysis.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, DeWitt was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland from 2022 to 2025. He earned his doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 2022 and his bachelor’s in mathematics and computer science from Haverford College in 2016.
Peter Hintz, professor of mathematics, focuses on partial differential equations arising in general relativity. His work relates to stability and gluing problems for solutions of the Einstein field equations and with the precise control of regularity and decay of solutions to related linear and nonlinear wave equations.
Hintz’s previous awards and honors include an International Association of Mathematical Physics Early Career Award in 2024 and a Frontiers of Science Award from the International Congress of Basic Science in 2023. In 2022, Hintz was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians and a plenary speaker at the 20th International Congress on Mathematical Physics. His research has been published in journals such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Physical Review Letters, and Physical Review D.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Hintz was an associate professor of mathematics and physics at ETH Zürich from 2021 to 2025 and an associate and assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2021 to 2022 and 2019 to 2021, respectively. He was also previously a Clay Research Fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute from 2017 to 2020 and a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2015 to 2017. He earned his doctoral degree in mathematics from Stanford University in 2015 and his bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Göttingen, in Germany, in 2011.
Sara Kaslisnik Hintz, associate professor of mathematics, develops and applies topological methods to analyze data from a variety of disciplines. These methods measure the shape of the data or build a combinatorial representation of its shape that can be combined with other methods. Her work has applications to other fields such as statistics, computer science, and the experimental sciences.
Kalisnik Hintz’s previous awards include the Polya Teaching Fellow Award from Stanford University, which recognized her outstanding teaching during her time at Stanford. Her research has been published in journals such as Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Algebraic & Geometric Topology and Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Kalisnik Hintz was a Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich from 2021 to 2025, an assistant professor of mathematics at Bently University from 2020 to 2021, and an assistant professor of mathematics at Wesleyan University from 2018 to 2020. She was also a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences from 2017 to 2018 and a postdoctoral research associate in mathematics at Brown University from 2016 to 2017. She earned her doctoral degree in mathematics from Stanford University, in California in 2016 and her diploma in mathematics from the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia, in 2009.
Peter Morfe, assistant professor of mathematics, studies partial differential equations, probability, and stochastic processes. One of the main focuses of his work concerns simplified mathematical models of interface motion in heterogeneous media. The goal of this work is to explain and understand the mathematics that underlies the physical phenomena.
Morfe’s previous awards and honors include a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2022. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Functional Analysis, Interfaces Free Boundaries, and the Journal of Statistical Physics.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Morfe was a postdoctoral fellow and an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences from 2022 to 2025. He earned his doctoral and master’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 2022 and 2018, respectively, and his bachelor of engineering in electrical engineering from Cooper Union, in New York, in 2016.