Prof. Merenkov's mentee wins gold medal and grand prize in international competition

Prof. Merenkov's MIT-PRIMES student Michael Iofin from Trinity School in New York was awarded the Gold Medal in Mathematics as well as the Grand Prize at the 2025 S.T. Yau High School Science Award competition held at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China on December 6-7. MIT-PRIMES, where Prof. Merenkov is a mentor since 2014, is a program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science for high school students, organized by MIT. In order to qualify for the Beijing Final, Michael Iofin competed in the North America Yau event held at Columbia University last November, and also received the Gold Medal there. The Yau High School Science Award is established in honor of Prof. Shing-Tung Yau, a Fields Medalist, having done research in differential geometry at IAS, Stanford, UCSD, and Harvard before returning to China after retiring. To win the Grand Prize, Michael successfully competed with Gold Medalists from the other five participating divisions: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, Economics and Financial Modeling. Michael's winning project is titled "Quasiconformal Normalization of Random Meromorphic Functions", and it was suggested and mentored by Prof. Merenkov.

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