The n-Category Café

Emily Gets A Huge Prize

Posted by Tom Leinster

Café host Emily Riehl has just been awarded a $250,000 prize by her university!! Johns Hopkins gives one President’s Frontier Award every year across the whole university, and the 2020 one has gone to Emily. Up to now it’s usually been given to biological and medical researchers, but when Emily came along they had to make an exception and give it to a mathematician. The award has the goal of “supporting exceptional scholars … who are on the cusp of transforming their fields.”.

Congratulations, Emily! Obviously you’re too modest to announce it yourself here, but someone had to.

You can read all about it here, including the delightful description of how the news was sprung on her:

When Riehl arrived at what she thought was a meeting with a department administrator, she says it was “a complete shock” to find JHU President Ronald J. Daniels, Provost Sunil Kumar, other university leaders, and many colleagues poised to surprise her.