Dr. Eduardo González’s parents never attended school because they had to work in the agricultural fields of Mexico. They were in no position to provide any guidance to their son as he made choices about his own schooling.
“I was always trying to do what felt right because I never had that influence,” says González. He found his way into a science oriented high school, where he fell in love with mathematics and physics. He enrolled in a Mexican college that also specialized in science and technology.
Two Mexican mathematicians who completed their Ph.D.s in the United States helped González understand in the late ’90s that he too needed to follow that path in order to be on the cutting edge of math. He arrived at Stony Brook University in 1999 and plunged into his doctoral studies.
González has emerged exactly where he wanted to be, doing high-level research on theoretical math that has attracted the attention of his peers and federal grantmakers. “What I do is pure mathematics with applications toward physics,” says González, who arrived at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2008 as an assistant professor of mathematics.
