UCLA assistant professor in mathematics Artem Chernikov has won a 2017 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation.

Through their career development awards, the foundation supports early-career faculty with the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. The foundation, as an independent federal agency created by Congress to support basic research and education in science and engineering, provides funds for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities.

Chernikov’s main research interest lies in a branch of mathematical logic called model theory.

With the award, Chernikov will work on the emerging connections between model theory and graphs — the basic, discrete mathematical objects used to model networks and related systems. Like Chernikov, practitioners of model theory study infinite structures and their properties that are definable in a formal language.

The UCLA assistant professor is a member of the UCLA Logic Center, an organization that seeks to foster teaching and research in logic, broadly understood to include all areas of mathematical and philosophical logic, as well as the applications of logic to philosophy, linguistics and computer science.