Acharya Named Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow

Professor Amit Acharya will be part of the first cohort of fellows for The Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship. This fellowship supports seven accomplished researchers to apply their expertise in a new field in mathematics or natural sciences. 

During his fellowship, he will work with his mentor Ambar Sengupta of the University of Connecticut. They plan to develop the mathematical background to establish a branch of mathematical gauge theory directly adapted to studying the dynamics and collective behavior of topological defects called dislocations and disclinations in nonlinear elastic solids. Their goal is to study topological defect dynamics in elasticity by path integral methods (at least in the finite-dimensional approximation) to understand its statistical properties, and thus hopefully shed light on the plasticity of crystalline solids — a scientifically intricate macroscopic phenomenon of great technological importance.