José Ramón Madrid Padilla

José Ramón Madrid Padilla is a Honduran mathematician and Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Department of Mathematics at Virginia Tech, working in harmonic analysis and its connections to number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory and PDE. He rose from the Honduran public school system to win Honduras's first-ever IMO medal (bronze, 2009; silver, 2010), then earned a PhD at IMPA in Brazil, held postdocs at Aalto and ICTP, and was a Hedrick Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCLA mentored by Terence Tao before joining Virginia Tech in 2023. He received the inaugural AMS Stefan Bergman Fellowship (2024-25) and the 2023 Mahony-Neumann-Room Prize.

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• Represented Honduras at IMO 2009 and won bronze (rank 264, 14 points) - the first IMO medal ever for Honduras; followed it with silver at IMO 2010. The 2009 result earned a national award from the President of Honduras.Jul 2009
• Awarded the inaugural AMS Stefan Bergman Fellowship for 2024-25, recognizing early-career researchers in analysis - the first recipient of the fellowship.Nov 2023
• Postdoctoral path spans four countries in six years - Aalto (Finland, 2016-17, mentor Juha Kinnunen), ICTP (Italy, 2017-18), UCLA Hedrick Assistant Adjunct Professor (2018-22, mentored by Terence Tao), and Geneva (2022-23, mentors Smirnov and Logunov) - before landing a tenure-track post at Virginia Tech in Aug 2023.Aug 2023
• Public professional email [contact omitted] and department address at McBryde Hall 570, Virginia Tech, are published on his CV - office contact is openly reachable.2023
• The 2009 IMO medal led to a two-month summer program at IMPA (Brazil) that, via a scholarship extension, became six years in Brazil - a UFRJ bachelor's plus IMPA master's (2012) and PhD (2016). The single olympiad result is the origin of his entire academic trajectory.2016
• Won the 2023 Mahony-Neumann-Room Prize from the Australian Mathematical Society and holds Simons Foundation travel support for 2024-2029.2023
• PhD thesis 'Regularity of fractional maximal functions and extremal functions of exponential type' at IMPA under Emanuel Carneiro; master's advisor was Alfredo Iusem. Career centered on harmonic analysis and regularity of maximal operators.Mar 2016
• Born 17 April 1993 in Honduras; grew up in rural Olancho and Santa Barbara and attended the Honduran public school system. Of five siblings the three oldest, including Jose, are assistant professors in Math or Statistics at US universities - an unusually concentrated academic family.Apr 17, 1993
• Research spans harmonic analysis and its links to number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory and PDEs, with named focus on the Collatz conjecture, decoupling inequalities and discrete analogues in harmonic analysis.2023
• Publishes prolifically with a broad coauthor network (Carneiro, Gonzalez-Riquelme, Beltran, Ivanisvili, Lacey, Durcik, Greenfeld, Jamneshan, de Dios, Han, Kovac) across top analysis journals - the coauthor graph is the best route to his current collaborators.2023
• Honduran press has tracked him since his teens: at 19 he was profiled in La Prensa attending a math congress in Germany; at 22 El Heraldo covered him finishing his doctorate - he is a national point of pride for Honduran mathematics.2012
• Featured by Lathisms on 25 September 2024 (a project highlighting Latinx/Hispanic mathematicians), with a dedicated poster - signaling active standing in the Latinx-in-mathematics community.Sep 25, 2024