Dr. Janusz Prajs Awarded the
2009-2010 President's Award

The President’s Award for Research and Creative Activity was established in 1989 and is given each year to recognize extraordinary research and creative activity over the past five years by a member of the Sacramento State faculty.  Nominees for the award must be in their first ten years of service at Sacramento State.  This year’s recipient is Dr. Janusz R. Prajs, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.  Professor Prajs is the twenty-first recipient of this award.

Dr. Prajs received his Master’s Degree in Applied Mathematics from the Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland in 1981 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Wroclaw in 1990. His field is Topology, an important branch of mathematics that studies properties of a space preserved under continuous deformations and those that describe how a space is assembled.

Prior to joining the Sacramento State Faculty in 2003, he taught at Opole University, Texas Tech University, Idaho State University and the University of Missouri at Rolla.

Prajs is the author of forty-five major referred publications, eighteen of them appearing since he joined our faculty in 2003. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation research grant entitled “Homogeneous continua in 3-space.” 

He has solved several major open problems in the particular area of topology dealing with spaces called Homogeneous Continua.  During the last five years Professor Prajs has introduced and studied several crucial concepts that capture structural properties of homogeneous continua.

He has presented at numerous international conferences and was invited to give a series of three plenary talks at the 2008 Summer Topology Conference in Mexico City. In addition his research and teaching are influencing the department’s undergraduate and graduate students alike to pursue the study of topology.