Staff

Brian Conrey is the founding Executive Director of the American Institute of Mathematics. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1980. He has served on the faculties of the University of Illinois and Oklahoma State University, and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study four times. He is also a Professor at Bristol University and a Consulting Professor at Stanford University. He serves as an editor of the Journal of Number Theory and is also active in Math Circles and Math Teachers’ Circles. His research interests are analytic number theory and random matrix theory.

Michelle Manes received her PhD from Brown University, and she has an MEd from Boston University. Her research interests are in arithmetic dynamics and arithmetic geometry more generally. She is an Editor-in-Chief of the journal La Matematica and is the Associate Secretary for the Western Section of the AMS.

David Farmer is a founding member of ARCC, the AIM Research Conference Center. He received his PhD from Oklahoma State University and his research interests are in L-functions and modular forms. Farmer develops collaboration tools for research mathematics and is past chair of the AMS Committee on Meetings and Conferences.

After receiving his PhD from Princeton University, Sergei Gukov spent five years at Harvard University as a research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and two years at the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Studies. His passion is building new bridges between different areas of mathematical physics and pure mathematics, such as quantum topology, mirror symmetry, and gauge theory. His more recent interests involve new connections between mathematics and machine learning.

Brianna Donaldson received her PhD from Indiana University. Her research interests include mathematical models of perceptual decision-making. Her responsibilities at AIM include Math Teachers’ Circle Network, a national network of professional development communities for middle school math teachers, and Research Experience for Undergraduate Faculty (REUF), a program for undergraduate faculty who are interested in mentoring undergraduate research.

David Crombecque joined as our Associate Director of Special Projects in January 2024, and is helping connect AIM with outreach activities in Southern California. Dr. Crombecque has spent 11 years as a faculty in the Mathematics Department at the University of Southern California. Dr. Crombecque’s interests have focused on increasing participation in mathematics. He developed Summer Programs in Mathematics at USC for first-generation students. He is one of the co-directors of the LA Math Teachers Circle and the project leader of Math On the Border. He is also a board member of Spectra. Dr. Crombecque is helping AIM to collaborate with Los Angeles area math educators, mathematics teachers, mathematicians, and the local math community at large.

In addition to her work for AIM, Leslie Hogben is a Professor of Mathematics and an Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. She received her PhD from Yale. She is the author of more than 100 papers, is the author of Inverse Problems and Zero Forcing for Graphs and editor of Handbook of Linear Algebra and three other books, and has supervised 23 PhD students and five postdoctoral scholars. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). Her research interests are linear algebra, graph theory, and their applications.

Ellen Heffelfinger supervises AIM’s historical mathematics collection and its working library. She holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.S. from Columbia. She spent 15 years in the rare book business, specializing in science, before joining AIM.

Hannah Brodie has worked for AIM since 1999. She handles all the everyday Financial Administration as well as Human Resources issues including payroll, benefits, 403b plans, and new hires. She has a background in finance, accounting, and general office management and is a Certified Grants Specialist.

Harpreet Kaur is assistant to the Director and Deputy Director and is responsible for most of the logistical aspects of the AIM workshop and SQuaREs programs. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics and some additional graduate work from Panjab University in India.

Pushpa Menon manages AIM’s extensive reprint library. She holds an M.A. in Economics from Bangalore University and an M.A. in Economic Policy and Labor from Boston University. Most recently she became a certified gerontologist. Pushpa has taught economics at Bangalore University, worked for the World Bank, and worked in commercial and investment banking.

Kelley Barnes is the program director for AIM Morgan Hill Math, a community outreach program providing math enrichment to talented math students in grades 4 through 12. Her responsibilities include identifying promising young math students, developing and coordinating math enrichment lessons, and coaching middle school mathletes to compete in competitions such as AMC8, Math Olympiad, and MATHCOUNTS. She has a BS in Biology and worked for twenty years as a registered veterinary technician before discovering an enthusiasm for teaching math.

Terry Busk joined the American Institute of Mathematics in mid 2017 as a logistics specialist supporting AIM’s math research goals. As a former handyman and martial arts instructor, he’s a multifaceted jack-of-all trades helping to manage day-to-day operations, such as lecture recording and production, as well as web development of both the Math Circles Network and AIM’s general research goals. In 2020, he assisted in the development of the MathCommunities.org initiative and continues to support the development of new technical projects.

Kent Morrison is on the Editorial Board for the AIM Open Textbook Initiative and helps maintain the technology infrastructure at AIM. He received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz and was on the faculty and served as department chair at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He has a number of research interests including combinatorics, probability, and game theory.