Join us after the 7:30pm performance on Thursday, September 20 for a conversation with Gigliola Staffilani and Juncal Arbelaiz.

Gigliola Staffilani is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Mathematics at MIT. She received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1991 and 1995 respectively. Following a Szegö Assistant Professorship at Stanford, she had faculty appointments at Stanford, Princeton and Brown, before joining the MIT mathematics faculty in 2002. At Stanford, she received the Harold M. Bacon Memorial Teaching Award in 1997, and was given the Frederick E. Terman Award for young faculty in 1998. She was a Sloan fellow from 2000-02. At MIT Professor Staffilani served as co-chair of the Graduate Student Committee in Pure Mathematics from 2009-2013, and is the Faculty Diversity Officer since 2015. In 2013 she was elected member of the Massachusetts Academy of Science and a fellow of the AMS, and in 2014 fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 she received a 2017 Guggenheim fellowship and a 2017 Simons Fellowship in Mathematics. In 2018 she was made the European Mathematical Society Lecturer of the year, and she received the MAA Hedrick Lecturer Award and the Earll M. Murman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising. As a member of the Department’s edX group Gigliola received the inaugural MITx Prize for Teaching and Learning in MOOCs by the MIT Office of Digital. Gigliola has three past graduate students and four current ones. She has also advised dozens of math majors at MIT.

Juncal Arbelaiz was born in the Basque Country (Spain) in 1992. She is currently a third-year PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics at MIT. She is a La Caixa fellow since 2017 and a MIT Presidential fellow too. Before coming to MIT, she earned her Bachelors (2014) and Masters (2016) degrees in Industrial Engineering at the University of Navarra (Spain). She won the UNAV Award for Academic Performance and the Kutxa Excellence Award at the end of her undergraduate studies. Later, she was awarded with the National Award for Excellence in Higher Education by the Government of Spain. She is committed to breaking down the barriers to entry which women encounter in STEM fields. At MIT, she is part of the executive board of GW@MIT (Graduate Women at MIT), an organization that builds a strong community of graduate women within the Institute