It was the rewarding undergraduate education and strong mentoring Brett Wick received at the University of Houston that helped launch his promising career in academia.

Wick, who graduated from UH in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in math, is an associate professor of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society for 2013, the program’s inaugural year.

While at UH, he benefited from lots of good advice and guidance from faculty mentors like John Hardy, a math professor and associate dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

As an undergrad, Wick was interested in both math and physics. However, his preference for abstract problems over laboratory research eventually steered him toward math, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. in math from Brown University.

Wick's research focuses on function theory and harmonic analysis. Teaching and research strongly reinforce each other, Wick said, and he values both.