Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences - PIMS

Current Board Members

Brian H. Russell (Chair) Vice-President, Software Hampson-Russell, Calgary

Dr. Russell joined Chevron Standard in Calgary in 1976 as a seismic interpreter, subsequently working for Chevron Geosciences in both Calgary and Houston in the areas of seismic processing and research. After leaving Chevron in 1981, he joined Teknica Resources Development in Calgary and, in 1983, he moved to Veritas Seismic Ltd. in a research and training position. In 1987, Dr. Russell, together with Dan Hampson, founded Hampson-Russell Software Services Ltd., a company that develops advanced seismic software for the petroleum industry. Since September, 2005, Hampson-Russell has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of CGGVeritas.

Dr. Russell is actively involved in geophysical research and training, and presents courses on seismic technology throughout the world. He holds a B.Sc. (Honours) from the University of Saskatchewan, a M.Sc from Durham University, UK and a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary, all in geophysics. He is registered as a Professional Geophysicist in the Province of Alberta.

Dr. Russell was President of the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists (CSEG) in 1991, received the CSEG Meritorious Service Award in 1995 and the CSEG Medal in 1999. He has also been active within the international Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG), serving as President during 1998-99. In 1996, Dr. Russell and Mr. Hampson were jointly awarded the SEG Enterprise Award.

He has been chair of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2005, and a member since 2004.

Alejandro Adem, Director of PIMS and Professor of Mathematics, University of British Columbia

In 1982 Dr. Adem received his BS from the National University of México, and in 1986 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. After holding a Szegö Assistant Professorship at Stanford University and spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990. He remained there until appointed Canada Research Chair in Algebraic Topology at the University of British Columbia in 2004. He has held visiting positions at the ETH-Zurich, the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, the University of Paris VII and XIII, and Princeton University.

Dr. Adem's mathematical interests vary widely over topics in algebraic topology, group cohomology and related areas. He has given over 200 invited lectures, including one for the celebrated Bourbaki Seminar in Paris. His monograph Cohomology of Finite Groups(written with R. James Milgram) was published as a Springer–Verlag Grundlehren (Volume 309) in 1994; a second edition appeared in 2004. He was awarded an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1992, a Romnes Faculty Fellowship in 1995 and a Vilas Associate Award in 2003. Since 2004 he has been an editor for the Transactions and the Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society.

During the period 1999-2002, Dr. Adem served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics at UW-Madison. From 2003 to 2007, he served as co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, and as a member of their Board of Trustees On January 1, 2005, he became the Deputy Director of PIMS, and on July 1, 2008 he became the Director of PIMS. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Association for Research in the Mathematical Sciences and the Banff International Research Station.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2005.

Fernando Aguilar President & Chief Operating Officer, Calfrac Well Services

Mr. Aguilar graduated as a Civil Engineer (MS) in hydraulic resources management in 1981, and received his MBA in 1990 from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. He completed the Stanford Executive program at Stanford University in 2003, and the Directors Education Program at the University of Calgary in 2007.

Prior to being appointed President and Chief Operating Officer at Calfrac Well Services, Mr. Aguilar was President, Geophysical Services for the Americas at CGG Veritas, a global geophysical company. Before April 2009, he held the position of President, Eastern Hemisphere, and prior to that was Executive Vice President for Canada Land Processing, Canada Land Library and Western Hemisphere Land Acquisition. Upon joining Veritas in 2004, Mr. Aguilar's leadership role encompassed responsibility for Canadian and Latin American operations and business sectors. Formerly with Schlumberger Limited, Mr. Aguilar has over twenty-seven years of worldwide experience in various technology, business and oilfield sectors.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2007.

Ken Barker Dean of the Faculty of Science, University of Calgary

Dr. Barker is the Dean of the Faculty of Science and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. He served as the Department Head of Computer Science for nine years before his appointment as Dean.

In addition to holding a Ph.D. in Computing Science from the University of Alberta (1990) he has 25 years of experience working with industrial computer systems, fifteen years of consulting experience in the design of commercial databases, and a particular interest in system integration, distributed systems, and the privacy and security of data repositories. As the director of research laboratories at the Universities of Calgary and Manitoba he has supervised over 50 graduate students, in addition to several post-docs and research assistants. Dr. Barker has published in excess of 225 peer reviewed publications in areas as diverse as distributed systems, software engineering, transaction systems, simulations, privacy and security.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2010.

Peta C. Bonham-Smith Vice-Dean, Science, College of Arts and Science, University of Saskatchewan

Dr. Bonham-Smith graduated with a B.Sc. from Wolverhampton Polytechnic, UK and earned her Ph.D. in Plant Physiology & Molecular Biology from the University of Calgary. In 1994, after completing post-doctoral positions at the University of Arizona, Department of Biochemistry; University of Calgary, Department of Biological Sciences and Biomira Inc., Edmonton, she joined the University of Saskatchewan, Department of Biology. From 2000 to 2002, she served as the first Director of the virtual College of Biotechnology and from 2008 to 2010 as Chair of the Department of Biology. Since July 1, 2012, she has been Vice-Dean, Science, College of Arts and Science. She is also the principal investigator of a lab researching the molecular cell biology of the plant ribosome and its importance in plant growth and development, in the Department of Biology. In 2009, she received the Teaching Excellence Award, Division of Science, Arts & Science and in 2002, Dr. Bonham-Smith was honoured with the Saskatoon YWCA Women of Distinction: Science, Technology and the Environment award.

In addition to her work at the University of Saskatchewan, Dr. Bonham-Smith is currently vice-chair of the board of Saskatchewan Research Council.

She has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2011

Charmaine Dean Dean of the Faculty of Science, University of Western Ontario

Dr. Dean’s research interest lies in the development of methodology for disease mapping, longitudinal studies, the design of clinical trials, and spatio-temporal analyses. Much of this work has been motivated by direct applications to important practical problems in biostatistics and ecology. Recently, Dr. Dean’s focus has been the study of climate change impacts, particularly in the area of forestry.

Dr. Dean is Past-President of the Statistical Society of Canada, was President of the International Biometrics Society (Western North American Region) in 2002, has served as President of the Biostatistics Section of the Statistical Society of Canada, and has given six years of service to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, including two as President of the Statistical Sciences Grant Selection Committee. She has served on the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Research Advisory. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Institute for Complex Data Structures and is a member of the College of Reviewers of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. She is Associate Editor of Biometrics and of the Canadian Journal of Statistics, and Senior Editor of Advances in Disease Surveillance.

Dr. Dean has served in governance at Simon Fraser University in many capacities. She played a major role in establishing the Faculty of Health Sciences while Associate Dean of that Faculty, and previously in establishing the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science; she became the founding Chair of that Department in 2001. In 2003, Dr. Dean was awarded the Centre de recherches mathématiques- Statistical Society of Canada Prize. In 2007 she was named Fellow of the American Statistical Association and in 2007 Dr. Dean was awarded the University of Waterloo Alumni Achievement Medal.

She has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2007.

Darrell Duffie Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, Stanford University

Dr. Duffie is the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, where he has been a member of the finance faculty since receiving his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1984. He is also a Fellow of the Council of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the 2003 International Association of Financial Engineers/Sunguard Financial Engineer of the Year, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and President of the American Finance Association.

Dr. Duffie’s research interests include over-the-counter market financial modelling, financial risk management, credit risk, valuation of defaultable securities, valuation and hedging of derivative securities, term structure of interest rate modeling, financial innovation, and security design. He is the author of Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory (Princeton University Press, third edition 2001) and co-author, with Ken Singleton, of Credit Risk (Princeton University Press, 2004). Recently, he has focused on how capital moves from one segment of asset markets to another, and the implications of imperfect trading opportunities for asset price behavior, especially in over-the-counter markets.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2007.

Renée Elio Associate Vice-President (Research) and Professor of Computing Science, University of Alberta.

Dr. Elio earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981 and joined the faculty at the University of Alberta in 1985. Prior to joining the University of Alberta, Dr. Elio worked at Bell Laboratories in Whippany, New Jersey, and then at the Alberta Research Council, where she led various initiatives in applied artificial intelligence. Currently she oversees various elements of the University of Alberta’s nanoscience partnerships, and serves on the management boards for the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning, Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Carbohydrate Sciences and the Health Law Institute. Dr. Elio has also served on the Boards of Directors of the Alberta Research Council and of the Alberta Information and Communication Technologies Institute.

Dr. Elio’s research concerns computational models of higher-level human cognitive behavior, such as learning, reasoning, and planning. Her work is interdisciplinary and includes both experimental studies of human performance on laboratory tasks and computer models of skill acquisition, agent communication, and control processes for executing concurrent tasks. Her book Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality (Oxford, 2002) considers the rationality debate for artificial and human agents, presenting perspectives from computing science, philosophy, and psychology.

She has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2008.

Haig Farris President, Fractal Capital Corporation

In 1972, Mr. Farris was one of the co-founding members and partners of the Ventures West Management group of venture capital funds, now the largest venture capital pool in western Canada. His venture management experience includes finding, financing and developing high-technology start-ups and corporate turn-around opportunities. Since 1990, he has been President of Fractal Capital Corp., a private venture capital company financing high technology start-ups and resource service technology companies. From 1993 to 2003, Mr. Farris was also an Adjunct Professor of the University of British Columbia (UBC), teaching a course on entrepreneurship to graduate engineering, science and MBA students. Mr. Farris holds a Bachelor of Arts (economics and english) and an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from the University of British Columbia, as well as a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Mr. Farris received the Bill Thompson Career Achievement Award from the British Columbia Technology Industry Association, and was awarded the Commemorative Medal of Canada in recognition of his service to the community. In 2001, the Vancouver Board of Trade named him a Pioneer of Innovation. He has been Chair of the Science Council of BC and a member of the founding Board of Directors for Science World, heading its first two capital campaigns. On the UBC campus, he served as President of the Alumni Association (1996-1999), is current chair of the President's Library Advisory Committee, and sits on the Dean of Science and Cecil Green College advisory committees.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2004.

Daniel Gagnon Dean of the Faculty of Science and Professor of Biology, University of Regina

Dr Gagnon is a graduate of the University of Ottawa (Honours BSc in biology), the Universite de Montreal (MSc in biology), and the University of British Columbia (PhD in botany). He joins the University of Regina after a 29-year career at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, where he taught a wide range of undergraduate courses and trained over 60 graduate students. He has received research funding from NSERC, FQRNT, provincial and federal ministries of environment, forest resources and agriculture, regional governmental agencies, and World Wildlife Fund Canada. He has co-authored over 60 scientific articles, 70 reports, and 100 conference presentations. He has given many public lectures, and published articles for the general public about ecology and the environment, including 86 weekly newspaper columns in Montreal's La Presse.

Dr Gagnon has considerable international experience, particularly in Ecuador and in the United States. Co-Editor in Chief of Ecoscience, the foremost ecology journal in Canada, he has served on several governmental advisory committees and boards of directors of non-governmental organizations.

Over a period of nine years he directed four large graduate programs in environmental sciences and biology. He was the first Director of Research at the Montreal Biodeme, a large public education institution that presents ecosystem reproductions, combining aspects of a zoo, an aquarium and a botanical garden. Dr Gagnon is one of four founding members of a forest ecology research group which grew over a period of two decades into the Centre d'etude de la foret, a provincially funded research centre with 53 researchers from 10 Quebec universities, and several associate researchers from other provinces. With two other founding trustees, he created the Eastern Townships Forest Research Trust (2007), the goals of which are to support research, student training and knowledge transfer on forest conservation, restoration, and sustainable management.

With his students, Dr Gagnon has studied the population dynamics of forest understory plants. Their results have led to provincial and federal conservation designations for many species. They were also the first to do research on reforestation with valuable hardwood trees in Quebec. With former PhD students Benoit Truax and Julien Fortier, he is currently involved in a million-dollar project to investigate the carbon sequestration potential of hybrid poplar agroforestry plantations.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2012.

Samuel Gray Chief Scientist, CGG, Calgary

Samuel Gray received his B.S. from Georgetown University and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Denver. He worked at the U. S. Naval Research Lab and General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) before joining the oil and gas industry in 1982. After several years at Amoco and BP in research and production roles, he joined Veritas (now CGG) in 1999. His early work on the theory of inverse scattering prepared him for a career studying seismic processing techniques, which have the goal of turning data recorded on the Earth’s surface into information about the subsurface. His work on seismic imaging has been recognized with a number of awards, including several best paper awards in geophysical journals and international conferences. In 2010, he received the Reginald Fessenden Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) for his work on true-amplitude seismic imaging. In 2012, he was the SEG’s Spring Distinguished Lecturer, presenting “A brief history of depth…and time seismic imaging”

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2013.

Norbert Haunerland Associate Vice President Research and Professor of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University

Dr. Haunerland studied biochemistry at the University of Münster and received his Ph.D. in 1982. Following post-doctoral work at Cornell and the University of Arizona, he joined Simon Fraser University in 1989. He currently is affiliated with the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and the Faculty of Health Sciences.

His research is focused on proteins involved in lipid transport and metabolism, with a special interest in their role in gene regulation. He is known for his use of invertebrate model systems, and has extensive expertise in insect biochemistry and molecular biology.

Dr. Haunerland has extensive experience in academic administration. He served as Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, as a long-time member of Senate, and on various committees and task forces. He had a leading role in the establishment of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, and has served provincially and nationally on higher education and research councils.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2007.

Jim Hendry Cameco Research Chair, Senior NSERC Industrial Research Chair and Professor of Geological Sciences, University of Saskatchewan

Professor Hendry received his Ph.D. in hydrogeochemistry from the University of Waterloo in 1984. He joined the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S) in 1995, where he established and leads an internationally recognized research group that studies the migration of contaminants in the subsurface of the earth, with a specialization in worldwide mining (uranium, potash, and oil sands) and agriculture.

Prior to joining the U of S, Professor Hendry was the Leader of the Groundwater and Contaminants Project for the National Hydrology Research Institute at Environment Canada, Director of Research for the National Ground Water Association in the U.S.A., Head of the Groundwater Section at Alberta Agriculture, and a consultant with Golder and Associates in Vancouver, and Gartner–Lee & Associates in Toronto.

His academic achievements include the Distinguished Henry Darcy Lectureship (2000), the John Hem Award for Excellence in Science and Engineering (2003), the U of S Distinguished Researcher Award (2006), the NSERC Synergy Award (2008), and an Earned Doctor of Science from the U of S (2008). He was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 2009.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2009.

John Hepburn Vice-President (Research), University of British Columbia

Dr. Hepburn received his B. Sc. in chemistry in 1976 from the University of Waterloo and his Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of Toronto, where his supervisor was Nobel Prize winner Dr. John Polanyi. Following a period as a NATO Fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught chemistry and physics at the University of Waterloo from 1982-2001, chairing the Chemistry Department for two years. In 2001, he became Head of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia before being appointed Dean of the Faculty of in 2003. He assumed the role of Vice President (Research) in October, 2005.

His research interests include: laser chemistry and laser spectroscopy; photoionization dynamics; applications of synchrotron radiation; surface reaction dynamics; laser ablation mass spectrometry; coherent control and ultrafast laser spectroscopy.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2005.

George "Bud" Homsy Deputy Director of PIMS and Professor, Departments of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering, University of British Columbia

Professor Homsy’s area of research is fluid dynamics and hydrodynamic stability, and he has published over 150 papers in the leading journals of the field.

Professor Homsy has held many positions during his career including Vice-Chair and Chair of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics, two terms as Department Chair at Stanford, Chairman of the Board of Universities Space Research Association (USRA), one term as Department Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Associate Editorships of both SIAM J. Applied Math and Physics of Fluids.

Professor Homsy is a Fellow of the APS, a Bing Fellow at Stanford University, and has been the Midwest Mechanics Speaker, the Talbot Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Bachelor Visitor at Division of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (Cambridge), and has had many visiting professorships in the U.S. and Europe. Professor Homsy was the Principal Investigator for the production of Multimedia Fluid Mechanics (Cambridge, 2001), and its second edition (2008). He is the recipient of the APS Fluid Dynamics Prize for 2004, and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2010.

Michael Miller Associate Vice-President Research and Professor of Computer Science. University of Victoria

Dr. Miller received his BSc in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Winnipeg in 1971. He received his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba in 1973 and 1976, respectively. Dr. Miller was a faculty member at the Universities of New Brunswick, Winnipeg and Manitoba, before joining the University of Victoria in 1987 where is is currently serving as the Associate Vice-President Research.

Dr. Miller was Chair of the Department of Computer Science from 1987 to 1997 and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering from 1997 to 2008. He was a member of the University Senate for many years up to 2008 and is currently the chair of the Senate Committee on Admissions, Reregistration and Transfer.

Dr. Miller has published 135 refereed journal and conference papers, four books and five book contributions in a variety of areas in digital and multiple‐valued logic design. His current research interests include the synthesis of reversible and quantum logic circuits, and decision diagrams applied to the design of binary and multiple‐valued logic systems using both conventional and spectral techniques. His international experience includes study leaves at TIMA Labs, Grenoble, France (1995‐96), the University of Bremen, Germany (2008‐09) and Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan (2009). He is actively collaborating with the research groups in Bremen and Sendai.

Dr. Miller is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He currently serves as the Secretary for the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multiple‐Valued Logic. In 2009, he received the ISMVL and TCMVL Outstanding Contribution Award for long term service to the international multiple‐valued logic community.

Dr. Miller’s current teaching includes the first programming course for engineering students and a third year course on computer organization.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2010.

Chris Nichol Professor of Economics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Lethbridge

Since July 1, 2001, he has been Professor of Economics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. After completion of his Ph.D. in Economics at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in 1985, he spent sixteen years at the University of Regina, from 1995 as Professor of Economics, and from 1997 as Head of the Department of Economics. Courses taught included microeconomic theory, macroeconomics, international economics and econometrics. His areas of research interest are in econometrics, applied econometrics and the theory of consumer behaviour. He is also keenly interested in macroeconomic policy debates, especially those arising in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. Several items related to economic decision-making and policy relevant to the crisis have appeared in the Lethbridge Herald, Public Professor column.

He has also served as a member of the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Economics, and a member of the Executive Council of the Canadian Economics Association.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2012.

Engin Özberk (former) Vice President, Innovation and Technology Development, Cameco Corporation

Mr. Özberk joined Cameco Corporation in 1997. Prior to that, he worked as Consulting Metallurgist for Sherritt International Corporation (1988 – 1997); as Senior Project Manager and Senior Process Engineer for The SNC Group (1979 – 1988); as Research Engineer for Noranda Technology Centre (1974 – 1976) and as Project Engineer for Etibank, Ankara, Turkey (1973). He has held several senior positions on boards and committees including President of the Canada Mining Innovation Council, Chairman of their Board of Directors and co-chair of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Cameco Chair for Nuclear Fuel of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

Mr. Özberk is a recipient of various awards including the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (CIM) Distinguished Lecturer Award (2009), and the Silver Medal (1997) and the Alcan Award (2006) from the Metallurgical Society of CIM. He has also received the Communication and Education Award (2007) from the Canadian Nuclear Society and the Extractive Metallurgy Science Award (1988) from the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society of AIME of USA. He has (co)authored more than 40 papers and chaired numerous international conferences and symposia.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2009.

Yuval Peres Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research

Yuval Peres is a Principal Researcher in the Theory group at Microsoft Research, Redmond (MSR). Before joining MSR in 2006, he was a Professor in the Statistics and Mathematics Departments at UC Berkeley.

He has also taught at Yale and at the Hebrew University. Yuval has published more than 200 papers with 100 co-authors and has mentored 19 PhD theses. His research encompasses many areas of probability theory, including random walks, Brownian motion, percolation, point processes and random graphs, as well as connections with Ergodic Theory, PDE, Combinatorics, Fractals and Theoretical Computer Science. He has recently co-authored books on Markov chains and mixing times, on zeros of Gaussian analytic functions, and on Brownian motion. Yuval is a fellow of the American Math Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He received the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1995, the Loeve prize in 2001 and was a co-recipient of the David Robbins prize in 2011. Yuval was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematics (2002) and in the European Congress of Mathematics (2008). He delivered the Porter Lectures at Rice University in 2009 and the De-Long lectures at the University of Colorado in 2013.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2013.

Edwin Perkins Professor of Mathematics and Canada Research Chair in Probability, University of British Columbia

Dr. Perkins completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois. He came to the University of British Columbia in 1979. His research interests in probability include Brownian motion, stochastic differential equations and partial differential equations, interacting particle systems, measure-valued diffusions and stochastic models in population genetics.

Dr. Perkins has won numerous awards for his research including the Rollo Davidson Prize (1983) (Cambridge University), an NSERC Steacie Fellowship (1992-1993), the Jeffery-Williams Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society (2002), and the Centre de recherches mathématiques-Fields Prize (2003). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1988), the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2003), and the Royal Society (London) (2007), and presently sits on the editorial boards of the Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré and the Electronic Journal of Probability. His invited addresses include the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich and the Doob Lecture at the 2009 Conference on Stochastic Processes in Berlin.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 1997.

Vaho Rebassoo (former) Chief Technology Officer, Boeing Information Technology, The Boeing Company

Dr. Rebassoo has over 25 years of technology management experience in network operations and computing. This includes key roles with the Pentagon Telecommunications Center, Bell Telephone Laboratories and, at Boeing, planning, designing, implementing and operating large complex networks and computing infrastructures.

Dr. Rebassoo received his B.A. degree from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees (in mathematics) from the University of Washington. He is a member of State Department and National Research Council IT committees and other boards.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2006.

Werner Stuetzle Divisional Dean of Natural Sciences, Professor of Statistics, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington

Werner Stuetzle earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1977 with a thesis on "Estimation and Parametrization of Growth Curves". After a first academic appointment with the Stanford Statistics Department and a brief stint at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, he joined the University of Washington Statistics Department in 1984. From 1994 to 2002 he served as the Chair of Statistics. Since 2006 he has been the Divisional Dean of Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. In this function he oversees nine departments (including Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics, Physics and Psychology) with about 250 tenure track faculty members and annual research expenditures of about $100M.

Dr. Stuetzle's research interests are wide ranging. He has made contributions to nonparametric regression and classification, computing environments and interactive graphics for data analysis, and three-dimensional photography. Recently he has focused on unsupervised learning, specifically non-parametric cluster analysis.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2007.

John F.H. Thompson Consultant, PetraScience Consultants Inc. and Professor, Cornell University

John Thompson obtained his BA from Oxford University and then moved to Canada where he completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Toronto. In 1982 he joined the BP Minerals group in Australia to work in mineral exploration, subsequently moving to an international exploration role based out of the UK. In 1988, he moved to Salt Lake City initially with BP Minerals and later with Kennecott-Rio Tinto. In 1991, John became director of the Mineral Deposit Research Unit (MDRU) at the University of British Columbia, managing exploration-related research for over twenty companies. In 1998, he joined Teck Corporation as Chief Geoscientist, and in late 2005 was appointed Vice President Technology and Development for Teck Resources Limited. In late 2012, he left Teck and is now Principal of PetraScience Consultants, an exploration, development and mining technology consultancy, and is the Wold Professor of Environmental Balance for Human Sustainability, a part time appointment at Cornell University.

John is the current Chair of Geoscience BC and the President of the Canada Mining Innovation Council, and a past-President of the Society of Economic Geologists. He is a on the Board of Genome BC and on advisory groups for Applied Science and the Clean Energy Research Centre at the University of British Columbia.

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2013.

Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann Professor of Mathematics and Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Geometric Analysis, University of Alberta

Dr. Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann received her M.Sc,, Ph.D., and habilitation, from Warsaw University in Warsaw, Poland. She taught at Warsaw University from 1970 to 1981 and held a visiting position at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas from 1981 to 1983. She came to the University of Alberta in 1983 and currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Geometric Analysis.

Her interests lie in Banach space theory and asymptotic geometric analysis, and the interaction between these two streams of modern functional analysis. A large part of her work, including most recently, is in asymptotic theory of normed spaces, asymptotic convexity, and asymptotic non-limiting theory of random matrices; in high-dimensional probability, probabilistic aspects of convex bodies, large deviations, small ball probabilities and entropy estimates.

Dr. Tomczak-Jaegermann has won numerous awards for her research including the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize in 2006, an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin (1998), a Canada Council for the Arts Killam Research Fellowship (1997--99), the Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship of the Canadian Mathematical Society (2000), the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research, University of Alberta (2000), and Sierpinski's medal of Polish Mathematical Society and Warsaw University (2013). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1996).

She has served on committees of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS), as well as on the Canada Council Killam Research Fellowship Committee, on the scientific board of BIRS, and on the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Fields Institute. She has also served as the first site director of PIMS at the University of Alberta.

She has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2013.

Andrew S. Wright Director of Actenum, Zymeworks, and Pharos Capital

Dr. Wright graduated from the University of Hull, England in 1986 with a first class honors B.Sc. and Dip.Eng., and subsequently in 1990 with a Ph.D. in microwave engineering. Upon emigration to Canada he joined the advanced technology division of Novatel Communications. In 1992 he joined MPR Teltech in Burnaby and in 1995 co-founded Datum Telegraphic, a company specializing in signal processing solutions for third generation wireless systems. Upon the company's acquisition by PMC-Sierra, he focused attention upon sustaining wireless technology development and management of the intellectual property and patent program. He served as CTO of Aegis Mobility from 2006-2008. Dr. Wright has published numerous peer reviewed research papers and has been awarded in excess of 50 patents.

Dr. Wright is an active angel investor and philanthropic activist for inner city child education enrichment programs (Super Science Club and Kidsafe) and a proponent of environmental stewardship initiatives (Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society and The Coastal Opportunities Fund).

He has been a member of the PIMS Board of Directors since 2009.