Hanfeng Li has received the UB Exceptional Scholar Sustained Achievement Award for outstanding research over the past several years. His publication "Soficity, amenability, and dynamical entropy" is forthcoming.
Li’s main research interest is on noncommutative geometry and dynamical systems, especially connections between operator algebras and dynamical systems. His recent work concentrates on actions of countable sofic groups and algebraic actions of general countable (amenable) groups.
The criteria for the Sustained Achievement Award (for senior scholars) are: (1) The work individually and collectively, must have garnered public and /or professional accolades beyond the norm for other bodies of work in the identified genre (e.g. citation analysis, critical reviews signifying the work is of enduring importance, completion of the work under the auspices of a highly prestigious fellowship or grant); (2) This award is for a body of work completed over a number of years.
The award was presented at UB's annual Celebration of Academic Excellence in Fall 2014. The award is not intended as a lifetime achievement award, but rather as recognition for outstanding performance in a recent segment of a scholar’s career. [September 2014]