Nike Sun, associate professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded the 2020 Wolfgang Doeblin Prize, awarded every other year by the Bernoulli Society. The prize is awarded to a single individual for outstanding research in the field of probability, and who is at the beginning of their mathematical career.

Nike’s research interest is at the intersection of probability, statistical physics, and theory of computing. She completed BA (mathematics) and MA (statistics) degrees at Harvard in 2009, and an MA St in mathematics at Cambridge in 2010. She received her PhD in statistics from Stanford University in 2014 under the supervision of Amir Dembo. After the doctorate she held a Schramm fellowship at Microsoft New England and MIT Mathematics in 2014–2015 and a Simons postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley in 2016, and joined the Berkeley Statistics Department as an Assistant Professor in 2016, and moved to MIT in 2018. She received (with Jian Ding) the 2017 Rollo Davidson Prize and an NSF CAREER award in 2019.