Lathisms
Creative Template
for Webflow
for Webflow
Marcus Michelen grew up in Albertson, New York, in suburban Long Island. He graduated from The
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Sciences and Arts where he received a B.S.E. in General
Engineering and a minor in mathematics in 2014. During college, his interests shifted away from
engineering, which led him to take a few actuarial exams. With his passion for math reignited, he attended
the University of Pennsylvania and received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 2019 under the supervision of
Robin Pemantle. During his Ph.D. he received departmental and university awards for teaching, as well
as the The Herbert S. Wilf Memorial Award for excellence in research and teaching.
Marcus started at the University of Illinois of Chicago (UIC) in 2019 as a postdoc under the title Research
Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. In 2020 he
entered UIC’s Bridge-to-Faculty program and began as an Assistant Professor in 2021. He has received
NSF support including a CAREER grant in 2024. Outside of math, Marcus loves most forms of pop
culture and can often be found listening to an album, watching a movie, or reading a novel when not
doing math.
Marcus’s work is in probability and combinatorics. Much of his work is motivated and inspired by adjacent
fields such as computer science and statistical physics. Some of his recent work has focused on sphere
packings in high dimensions, random matrices and random polynomials.
Marcus enjoys teaching courses from Calculus through graduate-level topics courses. Often his goal in
graduate courses is to show the power of probabilistic thinking in combinatorial settings and vice-versa.
He enjoys mathematical mentoring at all levels as well. He helped organize UIC’s 2024 Young Scholars
Program, a four-week summer program for Chicago-area high schoolers who are interested in
mathematics. He has worked with undergraduate students at UIC on the intersection between
mathematics and origami, has advised one master’s student, and is fortunate enough to be advising three
talented Ph.D. students at UIC.
“In my view, Latino Heritage Month is a valuable way of highlighting our collective contribution to society.
It is also an opportunity to showcase role models for the younger generation.”