FSU mathematics Ph.D. alumna Mariel Vazquez is one of 96 scholars to win the U.S. government’s highest honor for researchers in the early stages of their careers.

The award, known as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), was announced by the White House on July 23, 2012.

Mariel Vazquez

Vazquez, an associate professor at San Francisco State University, was a doctoral student of De Witt Sumners, the now-retired Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and former chair of the department. Both Vazquez and Sumners conduct research on DNA topology, harnessing the tools of theoretical mathematics to solve problems in biology.

“The adjectives I would use to describe Mariel Vazquez are creative, brilliant, tenacious, intuitive, artistic, personable, and courageous,” Sumners says. “Her senior undergraduate thesis at the National University of Mexico was on my DNA work—when I saw this, I knew she was the real thing and that I was lucky to get her as a student at FSU. It is always great to have students who are smarter than you are.”

The PECASE award is the third major accolade for Vazquez in the past two years. In 2011, she received a $600,000 Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her topology research, and in February 2012, she was named an “Emerging Scholar” by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, a publication that focuses on issues affecting colleges and universities. In addition to her work at the university level, Vazquez leads a “math circle” in San Francisco for kids between grades one and three.

Vazquez arrived at FSU from Mexico in 1995 and received her Ph.D. in Fall 2000, after which she did postgraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley for five years before becoming a faculty member at SFSU.