Generate a tailored SOP for Dr. Wei Zhang. Improve your application with a focused, well-structured draft.
Wei Zhang joined the Mathematics Faculty as a Professor in September 2017. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Peking University in 2004 and then obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2009, both in mathematics. Following his doctoral studies, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and was appointed as a Benjamin Peirce Fellow at Harvard from 2010 to 2011. He subsequently joined the mathematics faculty at Columbia University in 2011 and transitioned to MIT as a full professor in 2017. Zhang's research focuses on number theory, automorphic forms, and arithmetic geometry. His research program engages fundamental objects such as L-functions, which relate to generalizations of the Riemann Hypothesis and the central Langlands program. He is developing the theory of the relative trace formula to connect L-functions with algebro-geometric objects, and he has made significant contributions to conjectures stemming from the Gross-Zagier theorem on elliptic curves, including partial proofs of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for a majority of elliptic curves. His accolades include the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2010, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2013, the Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics in 2016, the New Horizon Prize in Mathematics in 2018, and the Clay Research Award in 2019. In 2018, he gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. He was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019, a Simons Investigator in 2022, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology • Cambridge, MA
Full Professor in the Department of Mathematics.