People

Ismar Volić is a professor of Mathematics at Wellesley College, where he has taught since 2006. He received a B.A. from Boston University and a Ph.D. from Brown University. His research is in algebraic topology. He is the author of over thirty articles and two books and has delivered more than two hundred lectures in over twenty countries. Prof. Volić was a visiting professor at MIT, Louvain-la-Neuve University, and the University of Virginia.  His research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation. He was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and a Fulbright Specialist and has held an endowed chair at Wellesley.

Prof. Volić was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and came to the U.S. in 1991 to attend his senior year of high school.  Soon after he arrived, a war broke out in his country and he has lived in the U.S. ever since. Prof. Volić now travels to Bosnia-Herzegovina frequently through his involvement in various education and research activities, including advising Ph.D. students and working with various agencies to bring quality STEM education to the country.

Prof. Volić likes to teach across the math curriculum, advise student research, and advocate for mathematics as a relevant and vibrant discipline.

Professor Chang received his PhD from the University of Chicago in mathematics. His specialty is a branch of algebraic topology called topological surgery theory of high-dimensional manifolds. He has written a dozen papers on the subject and is currently completing a 600-page research monograph, which he is co-authoring with his former thesis advisor. During the past 20 years he has been the recipient of numerous internal and external research grants. More recently he has increased his involvement in various multidisciplinary projects in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently the Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Wellesley, Chang has been actively engaged in the program of increasing persistence of underrepresented and underresourced students in STEM fields. He is the co-director of the Wellesley Emerging Scholars Initiative, an in-house, content-based program created to engage first-year Wellesley students of these populations who demonstrate an aptitude or interest for mathematics and science. This program was supported for a number of years by the Mathematical Association of America and has been shown to increase retention of underrepresented minorities in these subjects.

Chang was selected by the student body to receive the Pinanski Teaching Award in his second year at Wellesley College, and by the faculty to serve on the most recent presidential search committee, which ultimately chose the first black president in the history of the College.

Before obtaining his doctorate at the University of Chicago, Chang studied mathematics and music at UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, and then mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship.

Andrew Schultz is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Wellesley College. Previously, I was a J.L. Doob Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I finished my Ph.D. under the direction of Ravi Vakil at Stanford in 2007. I’m also an alumnus of the Project NExT program, part of the 2008-2009 Red08 Dots crew (R.E.D. red).

My basic research interests are algebraic, though more specifically I’m interested in Galois module structures of ‘interesting’ objects and Hilbert 90-like results. This has led me to dabble in some other fields as well, including algebraic geometry.