Named Graduate Fellows

Dr. Kristin E. Lauter is an American mathematician and cryptographer whose research areas are number theory, algebraic geometry, and applications to cryptography. She is particularly known for her work on homomorphic encryption, elliptic curve cryptography, and for introducing supersingular isogeny graphs as a hard problem into cryptography. Lauter served as President of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2015 –2017. She was Polya Lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America for 2018-2020. Lauter is the Head of West Coast Research Labs at Facebook AI Research in Menlo Park, CA.

Lauter and Thomas P. Passananti established the Kristin E. Lauter Fellowship through a generous endowment gift to MSRI to support and foster young mathematical talents.

Lauter received her BA, MS, and Ph.D degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago, in 1990, 1991, and 1996, respectively. Prior to joining Microsoft, she held positions as a visiting scholar at Max Planck Institut fur Mathematik in Bonn, Germany (1997), T.H. Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (1996-1999), and a visiting researcher at Institut de Mathematiques Luminy in France (1999).

She is a co-founder of the Women in Numbers Network, a research collaboration community for women in number theory, and she was the lead PI for the AWM NSF Advance Grant (2015-2020) to create and sustain research networks for women in all areas of mathematics. She has served on the Advisory Board of the Banff International Research Station and has served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society (2014-2017). In 2017 she was selected as a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in the inaugural class. Women in mathematics are of particular interest to Lauter, and this fellowship aims to support women graduate students in this important field.

In 1959 Miklos Salgo, a distinguished biomedical researcher, founded the Salgo-Noren Foundation. This foundation awards, among other things, a prize for excellent teaching at American universities and offers various exchange scholarships.

Dr. Marie A. Vitulli is an American mathematician whose research areas are commutative algebra and applications to algebraic geometry. Vitulli heads the Women in Math Project at the University of Oregon. She has established the Marie A. Vitulli Fellowship through a generous endowment gift to MSRI to support and foster young mathematical talents.

Vitulli was an undergraduate at the University of Rochester and earned her Ph.D. in 1976 at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research topics have included deformations of monomial curves, seminormal rings, the weak normality of commutative rings and algebraic varieties, weak subintegrality, and the theory of valuations for commutative rings.

With Mary Flahive, Vitulli has also studied patterns in hiring among women mathematicians. She is part of the 2019 class of fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2020 Class. Women in mathematics are of particular interest to Vitulli, and this fellowship aims to support women graduate students in this important field.