The 2012 Clay Research Conference will take place in Oxford. At the conference, the Clay Research Award will be presented to Jeremy Kahn and Vladimir Markovic:
For their work showing that a closed hypebolic three manifold has an essential immersed hyperbolic Riemann surface, i.e., the map on fundamental groups is injective.
And for their solution of the Ehrenpreis conjecture: that given any two compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces, there are finite covers of the two surfaces which are arbitrarily close in the Teichmuller metric.
The conference will to be held June 18-19 in Martin Wood Lecture Theatre in the Physics Department. Both Kahn and Markovic will speak on their work at that occasion. Other confirmed speakers are: Artur Avila (IMPA/CNRS); Francis Brown (CNRS); Stavros Garoufalidis (GeorgiaTech); Marc Lackenby (Oxford); and Peter Scholze (Univ. of Bonn).
Registration is free but strongly recommended. Please see http://www.claymath.org/ for further information.