Associate Professor,
Department of Mathematics,
University of California San Diego
In Fall 2004 I moved to Kingston to start an M.Sc. at Queen’s. In my first year as a Masters student, I took the standard graduate core courses in algebra and analysis, and found them very helpful in solidifying and extending the base of mathematical knowledge I had acquired as an undergraduate. At the same time, I met frequently with my advisor and attended the weekly seminar on probabilistic operator algebras. Attending the seminar helped to give me an idea of what the current research trends were in functional analysis; it was also enormously useful to see firsthand and how research-level mathematics is communicated. I was encouraged to present results from papers I was reading in the seminar, and this proved to be a very effective mechanism for accruing enough background knowledge to get started on my own research. After completing my masters, I decided to stay on at Queen’s and work towards a Ph.D. While it might have been possible to move to a larger graduate program to pursue my doctorate, I felt that the level of individual attention I was getting from my supervisor at Queen’s was unlikely to be matched elsewhere. By this time I had developed a good rapport with my advisor, and he gave me substantial leeway in finding my own dissertation topic while simultaneously ensuring that I was not straying towards problems that were either impossibly difficult or unlikely to be of sufficient depth and interest. I believe that this hands-off approach was very important in my development as a researcher, and greatly helped me to hone my own sense of what is interesting and important; this is perhaps the most important skill in research, and without it technical proficiency is useless.
"I was given many opportunities to attend national and even international research conferences, and in this way I was exposed to the work of the leading figures in my research area."
Jonathan Novak - Ph.D. 2009
I ultimately settled on a dissertation topic which overlapped somewhat with the core interests of the professors in the functional analysis group, but was not directly linked to their own research. However, far from this being a problem, the group was very supportive and showed great interest in learning more about the topic I had selected, frequently giving me opportunities to talk about the early stages of my thesis writing in the weekly seminar. This process resulted in a large amount of feedback which was very useful in zeroing in on the exact set of questions I wanted to address in my dissertation, and at every stage of thesis writing I felt that I had senior people around me who were more than superficially interested in my work. In short, it was the perfect balance of individual self-guided effort tempered by experience.
In addition to being very generous with his time, my Ph.D. supervisor, and more generally the entire math department, was very generous with resources. I was given many opportunities to attend national and even international research conferences, and in this way I was exposed to the work of the leading figures in my research area, and given the opportunity to connect with the broader research community. This greatly helped me to build my research profile and acquire a necessary baseline visibility for securing a postdoctoral position, and I am enormously grateful to the mathematics department for their support and generosity.
After completing my Ph.D. at the end of 2009, I held short-term postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Waterloo and the MSRI in Berkeley, and then moved on to a four-year instructorship at MIT. Following this, I became an assistant professor at the University of California in 2015. Now, as a professional mathematician with my own career underway, I remain in contact with my Ph.D. supervisor and many other faculty members at Queen’s, and return for regular visits. Several of the researchers I met while a graduate student at Queen’s are today my closest collaborators. Indisputably, my involvement with the ¾ÅÐãÖ±²¥ math department shaped my development as a researcher, and continues to do so today.