Scientific Review Panel
The scientific activities of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences are reviewed by an arm's-length Scientific Review Panel (SRP) of experts from various fields of the mathematical sciences. The SRP meets once a year to make recommendations to the Board on the selection of upcoming scientific activities.
Current SRP Members
Alejandro Adem Director, PIMS [ex-officio] is a Professor of Mathematics at UBC. In 1982 he received his BS from the National University of Mexico, and in 1986 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, under Bill Browder. 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 in 1990, and remained there until he joined UBC in 2004. Adem has held visiting positions at the ETH-Zurich, the Max Planck Institut in Bonn, the University of Paris VII and XIII, and most recently at Princeton University. Dr. Adem's mathematical interests vary widely over topics in algebraic topology, group cohomology and related areas. He has given over 150 invited lectures, however his toughest assignment was preparing a lecture for the celebrated Bourbaki Seminar in Paris. His monograph "Cohomology of Finite Groups" (jointly written with R. James Milgram) was published as a Springer-Verlag Grundlehren (Volume 309) in 1994, and a second edition appeared in 2005. Dr. Adem served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics at UW-Madison during the period 1999-2002. He was awarded an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1992, a Romnes Faculty Fellowship in 1995 and a Vilas Associate Award in 2003. He is an editor for the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 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 from 2003 - 2007. In 2004, Dr. Adem was appointed Canada Research Chair in Algebraic Topology at UBC; on January 1, 2005, he became the Deputy Director of PIMS, and on July 1, 2008, he became the Director of PIMS.
Dr. Adem has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2005.
Kai Behrend Professor of Mathematics, UBC. He did graduate work under Günter Harder in Bonn (Germany) and received his Ph.D. under Arthur Ogus in Berkeley (California), in 1991. He was a CLE Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining the faculty of the University of British Columbia in 1995. Dr. Behrend has hold visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn (Germany), the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto (Japan), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley (California), and Imperial College London (England). Dr. Behrend's research is in Algebraic Geometry. Most of his contributions are to the field of moduli problems. He is recipient of the PIMS research prize in 2001, has given the Coxeter-James Prize Lectureship of the Canadian Mathematical Society, is holding a Distinguished Professor award at UBC since 2008, and is the 2011 recipient of the Jefferey-Williams Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society.
Dr. Behrend has been a member of the PIMS SRP since July 2011.
Vladimir Chernousov Professor of Mathematics, University of Alberta. received his Ph.D at the Institute of Mathematics (Minsk, Belarus) under supervision of V. Platonov in 1983 and after that he had held some research positions at the Institute of mathematics and some faculty positions at Minsk University. Also he had some visiting positions in Max Planck Institute (Germany), Bielefeld University (Germany), ETH (Switzerland), EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). He joined the faculty of the University of Alberta in 2003. He is an expert in the theory of linear algebraic groups. His research interests include Galois cohomology, Lie theory, nonassociative structures, exceptional groups, Brauer groups, quadratic forms. He was awarded the Prize of the Academy Sciences of the USSR for the proof of the Hasse principle for E8 in 1990. He was a research follow of the Humboldt Foundation 1996-1997. In 2004 Dr. Chernosuov was appointed Canada Research Chair in algebra at the University of Alberta.
Dr. Chernousov has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2009.
Walter Craig Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Canada Research Chair of Mathematical Analysis and its Applications, McMaster University received his doctorate from the Courant Institute in 1981, with PhD advisor L. Nirenberg, after an undergraduate degree from Berkeley. He has held faculty and research positions in the mathematics departments at the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Brown University, before moving to McMaster University as the Canada Research Chair of Mathematical Analysis and its Applications in 2000. His research interests are in nonlinear partial differential equations and dynamical systems, with a focus on problems stemming from classical mechanics, fluid dynamics, and quantum mechanics. He has worked on the problem of free surface water waves, on KAM theory for partial differential equations and other systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom, on the propagation of singularities for Schroedinger's equations, on the singular set of solutions of the Navier - Stokes equations, and on the general theory of Hamiltonian partial differential equations. He is particularly interested in research in which surprising connections are uncovered between seemingly disparate parts of mathematics, as well as in situations in which theoretical results in mathematical analysis influence experimental or numerical approaches to a physical problem, and vice versa. Dr. Craig is a Fellow of the Fields Institute and of the Royal Society of Canada, as well as having been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Bantrell Fellow and a NSF Presidential Young Investigator. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Fields Institute, the Comité Consultatif of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, on the AMS Council and Executive Committees, and he is currently serving on a number of editorial boards of mathematics journals.
Dr. Craig has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2007.
Peter Guttorp Professor of Statistics, University of Washington and Director of the Northwest Research Center for Statistics and the Environment, is a Guest Researcher at the Norwegian Computing Center, and Affiliate Professor of Statistics at Simon Fraser University. He received his PhD in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980, and an honorary doctorate in Engineering from the University of Lund in 2009. Dr. Guttorp specializes in stochastic models in environmental sciences, hematology, atmospheric sciences, geophysics and population biology. He has published extensively both in the statistical and the scientific literature, is the sole author of two monographs on statistical inference for stochastic processes: Statistical Inference for Branching Processes (Wiley, 1991) and Stochastic Modeling of Scientific Data (Chapman & Hall, 1995), section editor for space-time models in Encyclopedia of Environmetrics (Wiley, 2001), and co-editor of Statistics in the Environmental and Earth Sciences (with Andrew Walden; Arnold, 1992) and of Handbook in Spatial Statistics (with Alan Gelfand, Peter Diggle and Montserrat Fuentes; Wiley, 2010). He is co-Editor-in-chief for Environmetrics.
Dr. Guttorp has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2009.
Pavol Hell Professor of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, received his undergraduate education at Charles University in Prague during1964-68, his MSc from McMaster University in Hamilton in 1970, and his PhD from the Universite de Montreal in 1973, all in Mathematics. His PhD study was under the direction of Gert Sabidussi. He has been a faculty member at the University of British Columbia, at Rutgers University, and, since 1980, he has been at Simon Fraser University, where he was promoted to full professor in 1983. He has held a number of visiting positions – at Universite de Nice - Sophia Antipolis, Charles University Prague, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Universite de Bordeaux, National Sun Yat Sen University Taiwan, and elsewhere. He was elected Chair of the Executive Board of the SIAM Activity Group in Discrete Mathematics, 2006 – 2008, and during his term worked to establish the SIAM Denes Konig Prize in Discrete Mathematics. He has served on the NSERC Grant Selection Committee 331, Computing and Information Sciences – B, 2005 – 2008. He is a co- founder of the CanaDAM series of biennial Canadian conferences on Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics, and has served on many program, executive, and budget committees for the conference (as well as for other conferences). He has served on the editorial boards of several mainstream journals in discrete mathematics, and is currently the managing editor of the Journal of Graph Theory. Since 2008, he has also served on the BIRS Scientific Advisory Board. His research interests include graph algorithms, optimization, constraint satisfaction, and complexity, with emphasis on homomorphisms of graphs and digraphs.
Dr. Hell has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2009.
George "Bud" Homsy Deputy Director of PIMS UBC. His field of research is fluid mechanics and hydrodynamic stability and he has published over 150 papers in the leading journals of the field. Professor Homsy has held many positions, including Vice-Chair and Chair of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, two terms as Department Chair at Stanford, Chairman of the Board of USRA, one term as Department Chair at UCSB, and the Associate Editorships of both SIAM J. Applied Math and Physics of Fluids. He is a Fellow of the APS, a Bing Fellow at Stanford University, and has been the Midwest Mechanics speaker, the Talbot Lecturer at UIUC, and the Bachelor Visitor at DAMTP, Cambridge in addition to many visiting professorships in the US and Europe. He 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 US National Academy of Engineering in 2006.
Dr. Homsy has been a member the PIMS SRP since 2010.
Niky Kamran James McGill Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University received his licence en sciences mathematiques from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1980 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 1984, where he was the Ph.D. gold medalist. He was the first recipient of the Andre Aisenstadt Prize in 1991 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002. From 2006 to 2008, he held a Killam Research Fellowship awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts. His research interests are in differential geometry, partial differential equations and mathematical physics.
Dr. Kamran has been a member of the PIMS SRP since July 2011.
Stephen Kudla Professor of Mathematics and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto received his doctorate from SUNY Stony Brook in 1975, with Ph.D. advisor Michio Kuga. After spending a year as a member at the IAS in Princeton, he joined the mathematics department at the University of Maryland, College Park in the fall of 1975. He moved to Toronto in 2006. He was awarded Sloan Fellowship in 1981 and was an invited speaker at the ICM in Beijing in 2002. He was awarded the Max-Planck Research Prize in 2000 and the Jeffrey-Williams Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society in 2009. He has been an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics since 2004 and has (co-) organized many research programs, including 4 Oberwolfach meetings, a thematic program at the Fields Institute in the fall of 2008, and a session at the joint Canada-France Congress on Mathematics in Montreal in the summer of 2008. His research interests include classical modular forms, automorphic representations, the theta correspondence, L-functions, arithmetic geometry and Arakelov theory.
Dr. Kudla has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2009.
Gregory F. Lawler Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago received his Ph.D. in 1979 under the direction of Edward Nelson at Princeton University. Before moving to Chicago in 2006 he held faculty positions at Duke University (1979--2001) and Cornell University (2001--2006). He has held visiting positions at many places including the Courant Institute, the University of British Columbia, the University of Cambridge, and several universities in France. He was awarded a Sloan Fellowship (1986), was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1991) and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2005), and received the George Polya Prize from SIAM (2006, jointly with O. Schramm and W. Werner). He is a probabilist who studies fine properties of random walks and Brownian motion with a particular interest in processes with strong interactions arising in statistical physics. In the last decade, he has concentrated on the two-dimensional case where conformal invariance plays a crucial role. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing in 2002. He was a founding editor of the Electronic Journal of Probability, has served as editor-in-chief of the Annals of Probability, and is currently an editor for the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. As well as many papers, he has authored or co-authored six books.
Dr. Lawler has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2010.
Michael C. Mackey Joseph Morley Drake Professor of Physiology, Director of the Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics in Physiology and Medicine, received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Kansas in 1963, and his doctorate in Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Washington in 1968. Following military service he joined the McGill University faculty in 1971 as a member of the Department of Physiology. He is currently the Joseph Morley Drake Professor of Physiology at McGill and holds associate membership in the McGill Departments of Mathematics and Physics, teaching in all three departments. He is also the Director of the Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics in Physiology and Medicine and the newly formed Centre for Collaborative Mathematics in Biosciences and Medicine. Dr. Mackey received a research prize in 1993 from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1999. He is a Fellow of the Hanse Wissenschaftkolleg (2000), the American Physical Society (2006) and SIAM (2009), and was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Mathematical Biology at Oxford University in the 2001 and 2002 academic years. His research interests include the dynamics of physiological systems, and the foundations of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.
Dr. Mackey has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2009.
Michael L. Overton Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics and chair of the Computer Science Department at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University received his B.Sc. from UBC in 1974, along with the Governor General's Gold Medal for Arts and Sciences. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is a fellow of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) and of the IMA (Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, UK). He served on the Council and Board of Trustees of SIAM from 1991 to 2005, including a term as Chair of the Board from 2004 to 2005. He is a member of the Council of FoCM (Foundations of Computational Mathematics) and served on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2001 to 2005 and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Fields Institute from 2001 to 2004. He currently serves on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Optimization (for which he was the Editor-in-Chief from 1995-1999), the IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis (for which he was an Editor-in-Chief from 2007 to 2008), SIAM Review, and Numerische Mathematik. His research interests are at the interface of optimization and linear algebra, especially nonsmooth optimization problems involving eigenvalues, pseudospectra, stability and robust control. He is the author of “Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic” (SIAM, 2001).
Dr. Overton has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2010.
George Papanicolaou Professor of Mathematics, Stanford University, received his Ph.D. at the Courant Institute, NYU in 1969 and joined the faculty there becoming a professor in 1976. In 1993 he moved to Stanford University where he has been professor of mathematics since that time. In the past he has been interested in waves and diffusion in inhomogeneous or random media and in the mathematical analysis of multi-scale phenomena that arise in their study. Applications come from electromagnetic wave propagation in the atmosphere, underwater sound, waves in the lithosphere, diffusion in porous media, etc. He has studied both linear and nonlinear waves and diffusion, in both direct and inverse problems. He is now working on assessing multiple scattering effects in imaging and communication systems, including time reversal arrays. Another recent interest is the use of asymptotics for stochastic equations in analyzing complex models of financial markets and in data analysis. Prof. Papanicolaou is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, won the SIAM von Neumann Prize in 2006 and also the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics in 2010.
Dr. Papanicolaou has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2010.
Linda Petzold Professor of Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Program, University of California at Santa Barbara, received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1978 from the University of Illinois. From 1978-1985 she was a member of the Applied Mathematics Group at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, from 1985-1991 she was Group Leader of the Numerical Mathematics Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and from 1991-1997 she was Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Petzold is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. She is a Fellow of the ASME and of the AAAS. She was awarded the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 1991, the Dahlquist Prize in 1999, and the AWM/SIAM Sonia Kovalevski Prize in 2003.
Dr. Petzold has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2009.
Tatiana Toro Professor of Mathematics, University of Washington received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1992. Since 1996 she has been at the University of Washington where she became a Professor in 2002. She has held positions at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and UC Berkeley. From 1996-2000 she held a Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and from 1994-98 she held an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Dr. Toro's research areas include geometric measure theory and partial differential equations. She applies techniques from these two fields to study free boundary regularity problems with very rough boundary data. These problems arise naturally in physics and engineering, where the free boundary may appear as the interface between a fluid and the air, or water and ice. She has also worked in the problem of constructing good parameterization for sets satisfying some minimal geometric requirements (for example: snowballs).
Dr. Toro has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2005.