Malabika Pramanik awarded the 2016 CMS Krieger-Nelson prize for research excellence

University of British Columbia Associate Professor, and former Cornell University Michler Fellow, Malabika Pramanik is the recipient of the 2016 Krieger-Nelson Prize for her outstanding research contributions. Pramanik uses analytical tools to answer questions about pattern identification in sparse sets; that is, in finding regular structures within sets that are otherwise very disordered and thin.

Pramanik was born in India, and obtained her bachelor's and master's degree in statistics from Indian Statistical Institute. She got her Ph.D. in mathematics from University of California at Berkeley in 2001. Prior to joining University of British Columbia in 2006, she held positions as a Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Fairchild Senior Research Fellow at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. She received the US Junior Oberwolfach Fellowship in 2005, and was funded twice by the NSF before joining UBC. She has held visiting positions at University of Rochester, Indian Institute of Science, and Beijing Normal University and is an adjunct professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Centre for Applicable Mathematics in Bangalore. She was the winner of the 2015-2016 Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize. Pramanik is an editor for Transactions and Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, and editor of Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.

Malabika Pramanik's research spans a range of areas of mathematical analysis. Referees commented that Pramanik "is one of the leading young mathematicians worldwide doing research in harmonic analysis and its applications" and "is one of the most talented analysts of her generation".

Most structures encountered in real life are complex assemblies of simpler components. Effective analysis requires careful decomposition of such an object, so that properties of the whole can be translated to the pieces and vice versa. Pramanik's field, harmonic analysis, makes this process mathematically precise. Fundamentally, this is like describing how the vibration of a string can produce different sounds by inclusion of different harmonics.

Pramanik's work, while exploring the theoretical aspects of harmonic analysis, is rooted in concrete applications to other fields. Pramanik’s research is also related to microlocal analysis and several complex variables where her main interest is the study of geometrically motivated operators like X-ray transforms and Bergman/Szegö projections.