The winner of the Canadian Mathematical Society's 2003 Doctoral Prize is Dr. Alina Carmen Cojocaru. The Award will be presented at the CMS 2003 Winter Meeting Banquet on December 7th at the Pan Pacific Hotel, Vancouver.

2003 CMS Doctoral Prize - Dr. Alina Carmen Cojocaru (Queen's University)

The CMS Doctoral Prize recognizes outstanding performance by a doctoral student who graduated from a Canadian university.

Dr. Alina Carmen Cojocaru received her B.Sc. in 1996 and her M.Sc. in 1997, both from the University of Bucharest, Romania. She received her Ph. D. from Queen's University in 2002 under the direction of Dr. Ram Murty.

She currently holds an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the Fields Institute and, beginning the Fall of 2003, she will be an instructor at Princeton University.

It is with great enthusiasm that the Canadian Mathematical Society awards the 2003 Doctoral Prize to Alina Carmen Cojocaru. As a graduate student of Ram Murty at Queen's University, Alina Carmen Cojocaru has written a remarkable thesis in the area of the arithmetic theory of elliptic curves. In this work she has studied the problem of understanding the collection of primes for which a given elliptic curve over the rationals has a cyclic group of points over the corresponding finite field. She has made significant improvements on earlier work in this direction by Rajiv Gupta and Ram Murty.

Only one year after her doctorate, Alina Carmen Cojocaru has already embarked on a productive research career with close to 10 papers published, accepted or submitted and several more in progress. She is also co-author (with Ram Murty) of a book on Sieve Theory soon to be completed.

For more information contact:

Dr. Graham P. Wright, Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society
Tel: (613) 562-5702
Email: director@cms.math.ca