Science Alumni Spotlight: Ilya Kapovich

Ilya Kapovich received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center in 1996 under the direction of Gilbert Baumslag. Subsequently, Ilya held postdoctoral positions at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Rutgers University. From 2000 to 2018, he was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, achieving the rank of tenured full professor there. In 2018, Ilya moved back to New York City and is currently a professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Hunter College. Ilya also has a doctoral faculty appointment at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Ilya’s research concerns geometric group theory and geometric topology as well as computational complexity. He has authored over seventy published research papers and received multiple individual and collaborative grants from the National Science Foundation and from the National Security Agency. He is a past editor of the LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics. Since 2012, Ilya has been a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. To date, Ilya has served as the advisor for nine PhD students in Mathematics.

Apart from teaching and research, Ilya is also active in human rights work. He has served as the Chair of the AMS Committee on the Human Rights of Mathematicians and of the governing Council of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition.