Assistant Professor Michelle Chu earns NSF CAREER award

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (2/21/2024) – McKnight Land-Grant Professor Michelle Chu of the School of Mathematics has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). These awards support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Assistant Professor Michelle Chu’s CAREER project aims to support research at the intersection of geometry, topology, and algebra as well as educational activities focused on local mathematical communities. She will investigate the relationship between the algebraic properties of groups and the geometric and topological properties of the spaces on which the groups act on. This work is an extension of Chu’s ongoing research in the area of hyperbolic manifolds. Her CAREER research will grant her new insights into the virtual properties of fundamental groups of hyperbolic manifolds and similar properties in broader classes of groups that extend beyond fundamental groups of hyperbolic manifolds.

The educational activities of Chu’s project will include development of a workshop for students and faculty in the upper Midwest region, a research seminar series bringing together geometers and topologists from nearby institutions, and supporting undergraduates from underrepresented groups through the Mathematics Project at Minnesota.

Chu joined the School of Mathematics faculty in 2022. Her research focuses on hyperbolic geometry, low-dimensional topology, geometric group theory, and arithmetic groups. She investigates the connections between the algebraic properties of groups and the geometric and topological characteristics of the spaces they act upon. In particular, her work examines hyperbolic manifolds and their finite covers by analyzing the subgroup structure of their fundamental groups. She has been previously awarded for her outstanding research and community contributions with the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship from the University of Minnesota (2024).

Chu is the second School of Mathematics faculty member to receive a CAREER award in the past two years. These prestigious awards support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.