A University of New Mexico associate professor is trading the adobe pueblo architecture and high desert beauty of UNM for the brick Romanesque Revival style and green grounds of Cornell University. Anna Skripka, an associate professor in the Department of Math and Statistics, was recently awarded the 2019–2021 Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize – which includes a semester of work at Cornell.

"I am eager to explore new techniques and directions in probability and analysis at the departmental seminars."   Anna Skripka, associate professor, UNM Department of Math and Statistics

The Michler Prize grants a mid-career woman in academia a residential fellowship in the Cornell University Mathematics Department without teaching obligations. This pioneering venture was established through a generous donation from the Michler family and the efforts of many people at Association for Women in Math and Cornell.

PR Michler 2019 - Skripka 1

Skripka was selected to pursue a proposed project to connect some of her recent work in noncommutative analysis with the research of Cornell Professor Michael Nussbaum on statistical problems of estimation, regression and asymptotic analysis. She works primarily in the areas of noncommutative analysis and operator theory on problems that emerged from quantum theory. Her proposed research will expand to noncommutative aspects of probability and statistics and combine function analytic and probabilistic methods.

“The existing partial results suggest that these problems should be approached by both analytic and statistical methods in their subtle combination, which we hope to find by joining our expertise," she said. "I also hope to advance on noncommutative approximation theory with help of consultations on combinatorial and multilinear harmonic analysis methods. I am eager to explore new techniques and directions in probability and analysis at the departmental seminars.”

Skripka earned her B.S. degrees from Kharkiv National University, Ukraine and her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri under the direction of Konstantin A. Makarov. She has been at the University of New Mexico since 2012. Prior to that, Skripka was an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M. She held invited positions at the UC Berkeley; Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon; and the University of New South Wales. She has been awarded 4 single-investigator NSF awards including a CAREER award.