The United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is honoring 20 individuals in 2024 with awards recognizing their extraordinary scientific achievements in a wide range of fields spanning the physical, biological, social, and medical sciences.

Among the 2024 NAS award winners is Sylvia Serfaty, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, who will receive the 2024 Maryam Mirzakhani Prize in Mathematics. Serfaty has made impactful contributions to the study of nonlinear partial differential equations, variational problems, and statistical physics problems. More precisely, Serfaty has studied problems from condensed matter physics, in particular superconductivity and micromagnetics, Coulomb systems, and vortex dynamics. She has developed fundamentally new techniques for analyzing the dynamics of interacting particles or defects and the spatial patterns they form. Her creative approach and capacity to work on a diverse but coherent family of problems shed new light on the Ginzburg–Landau model of superconductivity and the statistical mechanics of Coulomb-type systems.

Sylvia Serfaty will be honored in a ceremony during the National Academy of Sciences 161st annual meeting, on April 28.

The Mirzakhani Prize (formerly the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics) was established in 1988 by the American Mathematical Society in honor of its centennial. The prize was renamed to honor the late Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017), a highly accomplished and talented mathematician, professor at Stanford University, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Mirzakhani was the first woman to win the Fields Medal.

Made possible through generous gifts from the Simons Foundation and other benefactors, this $20,000 prize is awarded biennially for exceptional contributions to the mathematical sciences by a mid-career mathematician.