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.
He has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2005.
Carl de Boor Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison is a Professor Emeritus in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He won the 2003 U.S. National Medal of Science. An expert in numerical analysis, Dr. de Boor is the author of more than 150 papers and four books. He has earned world recognition for his work on spline functions, mathematical expressions that describe free-form curves and surfaces. In particular, Dr. de Boor developed simpler approaches to complex spline calculations, a contribution that revolutionized computer-aided geometric design. His work is now routinely applied in a range of fields that rely on precise geometry, including the use of special effects in films, and in the aircraft and automotive industries. Dr. de Boor grew up in East Germany and came to the United States in 1959. He received a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1966 and joined the UW-Madison faculty in 1972. Until 2003, Dr. de Boor was the Steenbock Professor of Mathematical Sciences and the P.L. Chebyshev Professor of Mathematics and Computer Sciences. He was awarded the John von Neumann Prize by SIAM in 1996. In 1993 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1997 to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. de Boor also is a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher (1998) and a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2000). He holds honorary doctorates from Purdue University (1993) and the Technion in Israel (2002).
He has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2005.
Gunnar Carlsson Professor of of Mathematics, Stanford University received the doctorate from Stanford University in 1976, and has held faculty positions at University of Chicago (1976-78), University of California (San Diego) (1978-1986), Princeton University (1986-1991), and Stanford University (1991- ). He held a Sloan Research Fellowship 1984-1987, and was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986. He works in algebraic topology, and has contributed to homotopy theory, equivariant topology, algebraic K-theory, and high dimensional manifold theory. In recent years, he has additionally been working in computational topology, with the intent to find interesting applications of topological methods in the recognition of patterns in high dimensional data and in other applied problems. He is an editor of numerous journals, including Mathematical Research Lettes, Journal of K-theory, and Homology, Homotopy, and Applications. He has been involved in the organization of programs in various areas of topology, including the MSRI emphasis year in algebraic topology (1989-90), the conferences ATMCS I-II-II on algebraic topological methods in computer science, the one semester program at MSRI on applications of algebraic topology (Fall 2006), and the Fields Institute thematic program on geometric applications of homotopy theory (Winter-Spring 2007).
Dr. Carlsson has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2007.
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 (Lausanna, 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.
He 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 joined the PIMS SRP in 2010.
Richard Kenyon Professor of Mathematics, Brown University received his PhD in 1990 at Princeton University under the direction of William Thurston. Dr. Kenyon held a postdoctoral position at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques and then a position at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Grenoble, Lyon and Paris. He was appointed as a Canada Research Chair at UBC in 2004. He won a CNRS bronze medal in 1999 and the Rollo Davidson prize in 2001. His research interests are in statistical mechanics, combinatorics, and discrete geometry.
He has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2006.
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.
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.
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.
Donald Saari Professor of Mathematics and of Economics, University of California at Irvine is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and of Economics as well as the Director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California at Irvine. He received his undergraduate degree from Michigan Technological University and his Ph.D. from Purdue University (advisor: Harry Pollard) where his thesis discussed the collision dynamics of the Newtonian N-body problem. After a postdoctoral position in the Yale University Astronomy Department, Dr. Saari joined the Mathematics Department at Northwestern University where he served as chair of the department and was the first Pancoe Professor of Mathematics. After three decades at Northwestern, in July 2000, he moved to California. Dr. Saari's research interests centre on dynamical systems and their applications to mathematical physics (primarily the Newtonian N-body problem) as well as to mathematical issues from the social sciences coming from economics, voting theory, and evolutionary behaviour. He is the Chief Editor of the "Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society" as well as serving on the editorial boards of several journals on analysis, dynamics, economics, and decision analysis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, the past chair of the U.S. National Committee of Mathematics, chair of the U.S. delegation to the 2002 general assembly of the International Mathematical Union, and a member of several NRC committees including Math Science Education Board. He has honorary doctorates from Purdue, Universite de Caen, and Michigan Technological University.
He has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2005.
Barry Sanders iCore Chair of Quantum Information Science and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information Science, University of Calgary is iCORE Chair of Quantum Information Science and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information Science at the University of Calgary. He is especially well known for seminal contributions to theories of quantum-limited measurement, highly nonclassical light, practical quantum cryptography, and optical implementations of quantum information tasks. His current research interests include quantum resources and also optical and atomic implementations of quantum information tasks and protocols.
Dr. Sanders is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (U.K.), the Optical Society of America, the Australian Institute of Physics, and the American Physical Society, a past President of the Australian Optical Society, former Secretary-Treasurer of the American Physical Society Topical Group on Quantum Information, Vice-Chair of the Canadian Association of Physicists Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photonic Interactions, a member of the American Institute of Physics Education Advisory Committee, an editorial board member for Physical Review A, New Journal of Physics, Optics Communications and Applied Mathematics and Information Sciences, a Leader of the Optical Society of America Quantum Optical Science and Technology Technical Group and advisory board member for Optics Communications. In addition, Dr. Sanders serves on numerous conference committees for the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), the Optical Society of America, and various quantum information conferences.
He has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2006.
Gang Tian Professor of Mathematics, Princeton University received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1988. After positions at Princeton University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he went to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1991 as an associate professor and became a full professor in 1992. He was a J. Simons professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is now back at Princeton. Dr. Tian is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship (1991-1993). He presented an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto in 1990 and a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematics in Beijing in 2002. In 1994, he received the 19th Alan Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. In 1996, Dr. Tian received the Veblen Prize of the American Mathematical Society.
He has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2002.
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).
She has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2005.
