Graduate students Timmy Ma, mathematics, and Cole Williams, economics, are the 2018 IMBS Jean-Claude Falmagne Dissertation Award recipients. The honor recognizes this year’s co-recipients for dissertations that best utilize mathematics to develop conceptual advances for issues coming from the social and behavioral sciences. 

Ma transferred from El Camino Community College to UC Berkeley where he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics. In June, he earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at UC Irvine. His dissertation, “A Nonlinear Approach To Learning From An Inconsistent Source,” focused on mathematical modeling of language learning. Over the past several years, Ma dedicated time to develop his teaching and was a Pedagogical Fellow for his department. Ma will begin his postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College in the fall. 

Williams received his bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics UC Riverside in 2013. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at UCI in 2018. Cole's research is in information economics. His dissertation, “Heterogeneity in Learning,” focused on social learning in environments with heterogeneity. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the Information Acquisition, Diffusion and Disclosure in Markets project at the University of Vienna.

-courtesy of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences