Anna Little is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utah and a core member of the Utah Center for Data Science and AI. She received a PhD in mathematics from Duke University in 2011 and was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Jacksonville University from 2012-2017, a primarily undergraduate liberal arts institution. 

Motivated by a desire to focus more of her professional energy on research, she left Jacksonville University in 2018 to complete a research postdoc at Michigan State University. After completing her postdoc, she began a tenure-track position at the University of Utah in 2021. She has been the principal investigator on multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award in 2025. 

Her research interests include geometric and graph-based methods for high-dimensional data analysis and signal processing with group invariant features. 

Dr. Ila Varma (they/she) is an Associate Professor at University of Toronto. They were a Sloan Research Fellow (2020-2024) and have been awarded the Connaught Research Fund (2021-2022). They are also a former Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands. 

Previously, Dr. Varma was an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego (2018-2019). Before that, they were a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. Dr. Varma received their Ph.D. in September 2015 at Princeton University under the advisement of Manjul Bhargava and Richard Taylor. 

Prof. Varma’s main interests are: 

• Rehumanizing mathematics (see here)

• Arithmetic statistics--in particular, asymptotics of class groups and number fields;

• Galois representations and (p-adic) automorphic forms.