May 09, 2006 - Claremont, Calif. -

Associate Professor of Mathematics Lesley Ward has been recognized by the Mathematical Association of America with the Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning Faculty Member. The award will be given August 11 at the MAA's MathFest in Knoxville, Tenn.

This is the third year the MAA has given the award and the second year a member of the faculty of the HMC Department of Mathematics has been recognized. Associate Professor of Mathematics Francis Su earned the Alder Award in 2004.

A native of Australia, Ward earned her B.Sc. (with first class honours) in pure mathematics from the Australian National University, and her M.S., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. Ward joined the faculty at Harvey Mudd College in 1997. Prior to that, she was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Mathematical Analysis, Australian National University; Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley; and Evans Instructor of Mathematics at Rice University.

She is an outspoken advocate for women pursuing careers in mathematics and was an invited speaker at last year's Women in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering conference at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, Calif. She organized the inaugural Harvey Mudd College Mathematics Conference (formerly the Mt. Baldy Conference) in 1999. The conference draws mathematicians from around the world each year to discuss topics such as analysis, mathematical biology and scientific computing.

Ward's research interests include complex analysis, Fuchsian groups, quasiconformal maps, harmonic measure, doubling measures, dyadic weights, harmonic analysis and link analysis (web search). Her teaching interests include complex analysis, complex dynamics, real analysis, differential equations, wavelets, calculus, linear algebra and the HMC Mathematics Clinic.

Many of Ward's additional achievements and contributions to mathematics are noted in the MAA citation for the award, which follows:

Lesley Ward has shown herself to be both an effective and enormously popular teacher at Harvey Mudd College. Student and faculty evaluations are consistently high and uniformly enthusiastic. She is termed an "outstanding lecturer" by faculty at other institutions. She is credited with making the senior thesis requirement at HMC into a cohesive program, and she has advised five seniors for their thesis work and co-authored four research papers with undergraduates.

One of her students was cited as having the best student paper in the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal one year, and another was awarded an Honorable Mention in the AWM's Schafer Prize competition. She has mentored many women students in mathematics, and she served as an adviser to the Society for Women Engineers. Her former chair credits her with innovative work in the redesign of the core mathematics curriculum at HMC.

Her offering of a new course on wavelets led to an invitation for her to teach a three-week course for undergraduates for the 2003 IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute in Park City, Utah. She co-taught a course for the summer 2004 IAS/Princeton Program for Women in Mathematics, at the Institute for Advanced Study. For these and numerous other signs of excellent teaching, Lesley Ward is granted a 2006 Alder Award.