A competition was held for four positions of an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. The following candidates were elected:

• Nina Lebedeva is one of the world leaders in the theory of Alexandrov spaces. She works on geometric analysis and transport problems. She was a visiting professor at the University of Cologne (Germany), now she is a member of PDMI RAS.
• Eric Mortenson is a renowned specialist in number theory, special functions, and combinatorics. Among his main results are the calculation of the radial limits of false theta functions, the proof of supercomparisons, including the Rodriguez-Willegas hypothesis using p-adic gamma functions, and the proof of the Van Hamm hypothesis. He was an invited professor at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Queensland.
• Roman Romanov is one of the world’s leading experts in the theory of canonical systems and related spectral problems. Over the past 5 years he has solved several important problems of spectral theory, in particular the question of describing the Hamiltonians which was posed by L. de Branges, and that was open since ’60s. He also solve a problem posed by Livšic about the growth order of the elements of the Nevanlinna matrix. This question was open for over 70 years and attracted the attention of many famous mathematicians. He currently works at the Physics Department of St. Petersburg State University.
• Alexander Tiskin is a prominent researcher in the field of parallel algorithms. He got his PhD from Oxford University. He obtained several well-known results in the theory of combinatorial optimization. He has extensive experience in supervising undergraduate and graduate students. Since he was a faculty member of one of the leading UK universities – University of Warwick.