USC Mathematics Divisional Dean Aaron Lauda first sought to build a proposal to the National Science Foundation to win the prestigious Research Training Group grant in 2011. Lauda said it was ambitious and, ultimately, unsuccessful, but that didn’t stop him. Since then, he has worked to build a stronger faculty full of new faces and ideas.

This year, Lauda, along with four other principal investigators, put together a new proposal and just last month, they were awarded the $3 million RTG grant by the NSF.

“It’s quite an honor,” said Aaron Lauda, the divisional dean for the Physical Sciences and Mathematics. “Very few universities get these awards each year, so the fact that we’ve been given one is a really positive sign for USC.”

The RTG grant funds $3 million over a span of five years to advance the training of undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students in the mathematical sciences through new research opportunities.

The group of USC faculty who proposed the grant and will oversee it consists of five principal investigators, along with several affiliated faculty members. According to the group, the money will fund research opportunities for USC students and outreach initiatives in the subfields of geometry, topology and representation theory.

“They’re very largely represented areas at USC and provide a pipeline both into research careers, but also into different aspects of industry,” said Sheel Ganatra, the lead PI. “For instance, geometry has also been appearing considerably in the study of large data.”

Lauda said that even though most students and faculty are not familiar with these ideas, they are a crucial area of study.

“While [these areas] sound very far out and kind of sophisticated, they really are at the cutting edge of a lot of what’s going on in physics and math applications,” Lauda said.

The grant will give USC students a chance to explore the research being done in each of the subfields and learn the biggest ideas in modern math.

“We have dedicated efforts to take these new ideas and then bring them directly to students,” Lauda said. “Whether that’s brand new classes that we didn’t have before … [or] dedicated undergraduate research opportunities.”

The grant will allow graduate students to focus on their own research, rather than spend considerable time supporting a professor as a Teaching Assistant. It will also fund new materials and activities for USC’s Math Teachers’ Circle, a long-running program that helps K-12 math teachers in the Los Angeles area learn new, fun math material for students.

The grant’s main goal is to enhance Dornsife’s math department and allow students and faculty of all levels to come together to advance mathematics research.

One of the programs the grant will fund is Dornsife’s Math Summer Research Program. MSRP will provide undergraduate students studying math with research opportunities over the summer that are focused on geometry, topology and representation theory. Graduate students will have the opportunity to mentor these undergraduate students and gain teaching skills through the program.

“You have this interaction between undergrads, grad students, postdocs and faculty. So there’s layers of interaction where students are going to get a lot more than the sum of the parts that they would get just from their normal classes and normal interaction with faculty,” Lauda said.

Lauda said he first sought out the grant in 2011, but was overly ambitious and unable to build a proposal outlining advanced research training programs for students that was strong enough to win. Since then, he has worked to build a stronger faculty full of new faces, and this year, it paid off.

Julian Chaidez, another PI on the team who wrote this year’s proposal, said they were losing hope before they found out they had won.

“We kind of had given up on it because we didn’t hear about it for a long time,” Chaidez said. “There was just a lot of uncertainty in the NSF surrounding grants in general.”

The NSF has faced deep cuts since President Trump took office in January. The mathematical sciences were one of the most deeply cut subjects, seeing a 72% reduction in federal funding this year. NSF grants make up a significant portion of funding for mathematics, and much of the NSF money is allotted toward research stipends for students.

Despite the cuts to math research, Lauda said funding math is important because it will make breakthroughs in nearly every field, and challenge common perceptions of math.

“As we push the boundaries of understanding and physics and life science and economics, we run into these new problems where we don’t have the tools to solve,” Lauda said. “And then math is creating new tools to solve those problems.”

Chaidez said the grant will help the mathematics department gain traction.

“Getting the grant at all is a really big achievement, so it’ll help enhance the reputation of the department,“ Chaidez said. “I think the activities are going to transform USC into one of the centers of [geometry and representation theory]”

Lauda said this is not just an achievement for the math department, but one for the whole University.

“This is putting USC higher on the map,” Lauda said. “I think that’s something that we can all be proud of. We’re part of a university where we have an elite math department that’s being recognized by this major award.”