Professor Kari Vilonen awarded ARC Laureate Fellowship

Professor Kari Vilonen has been awarded a highly prestigious ARC Laureate Fellowship, to address deep and longstanding questions about mathematics.

Professor Vilonen received one of only 14 Laureate Fellowships awarded nationally by the Australian Research Council. He will get more than $3 million in funding over five years for fundamental research into the Langlands program. The Langlands program can be regarded as the grand unification of mathematics. For years it has attracted some of the brightest minds in mathematics, including several top Australian mathematicians working in the United States. Professor Vilonen will use his ARC Laureate Fellowship to connect these top expatriate mathematicians with the Australian mathematics community, increasing Australia’s capacity in number theory and algebraic geometry, which are playing an ever more important role in technology and communications.

He joins an elite list of world-class researchers and leaders in their field, including 11 colleagues from the Faculty of Science.

ARC Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Professor Sue Thomas, said the fellowships provide support to some of the best and brightest researchers working to build on Australia’s knowledge base for the future.

“The ARC’s Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme aims to attract and retain outstanding researchers so they can undertake their ground-breaking, internationally-competitive research here in Australia in order to produce knowledge that is applicable in the real world, and in important priority areas,” she said.

“Australian Laureate Fellows also perform a vital role in nurturing research training environments, to develop and mentor our early career researchers who will learn from their experience.”

Professor Vilonen is a professor of pure mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne.

More information about the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme is available on the ARC website.