Four students successfully defended Ph.D. dissertations in Spring 2018: Jennifer Edmonds ("The structure of 4-clusters in fullerenes", advised by Jack Graver), James Heffers ("Lelong numbers and geometric properties of upper level sets of currents on projective space", advised by Dan Coman), Xiaoxia Liu ("Implicit fixed-point proximity framework for optimization problems and its applications", advised by Lixin Shen and Yuesheng Xu), and Robert Roy ("Auslander-Reiten sequences over Gorenstein rings of dimension one", advised by Graham Leuschke). Jennifer and Robert shared the 2018 Donald E. Kibbey Prize in Mathematics, which James received in 2017.

Mingyue Wang won the first prize for her poster "A two-stage design for selecting the t best among Bernoulli treatments and a control" at a conference of the Biopharmaceutical Section of American Statistical Association. Mingyue's PhD advisor is Pinyuen Chen.

Stephen Farnham and Joash Geteregechi were selected as recipients of Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards for this academic year. This award is presented by the Graduate School to TAs who have made distinguished contributions through instructional activities. Graduate students are nominated for the award by their departments, and the selection is made by a University-wide committee of faculty recognized for their teaching excellence. The Outstanding TA Award is given to approximately the top 4% of all TAs campus-wide.

This year's winners of the Robert M. Exner Prize in Mathematics Education were Julia Berger and Grace Njuguna,