Alejandro Adem | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

President, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)

Alejandro Adem is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia and the President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Previously Prof. Adem served as the Director of PIMS from 2008-2015 and has also served as Deputy Director and in various other capacities.

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 monographCohomology 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 has also served on the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Association for Research in the Mathematical Sciences and the Banff International Research Station.

Dr. Adem's term as director ended in 2015.

Homotopy limits and colimits are a fundamental tool in homotopy theory, with applications to topology, geometry, and algebra. The event is aimed at graduate students, postdocs, and early-career researchers who want to learn more about this topic. The...

The Cascade Topology Seminar is a bi-annual gathering of topologists from the Pacific Northwest and Southwestern Canada.

We discuss generators for the ideal of truncated symmetric polynomials and some applications to topology. This is joint work with Z. Reichstein.

This conference in held in honour of Hiroaki Terao. The goal of this conference is to examine the current status of research in hypergeometric integrals, differential forms and derivations on divisors, as well as hyperplane arrangements in general...

In this talk we will discuss properties of spaces of homomorphisms Hom(Q,G) where Q is a discrete group and G a Lie group. The example given by the ordered commuting n-tuples in a compact Lie group will be explained in some detail. We will discuss...

Abstract: Let G denote a compact connected Lie group with torsion-free fundamental group acting on a compact space X such that all the isotropy subgroups are connected and of maximal rank. Let T be a maximal torus with Weyl group W. We derive...

We discuss the general problem of computing the cohomology and topological K-theory for classifying spaces of crystallographic groups. Integral computations will be provided for groups with prime order holonomy.

This is continuation from the previous week: We discuss the general problem of computing the cohomology and topological K-theory for classifying spaces of crystallographic groups. Integral computations will be provided for groups with prime order...

This is the 50th Anniversary of the CTS!

In this talk, we will consider topological spaces arising from commuting unitary and orthogonal matrices. Basic properties will be discussed, such as the number and structure of their path components. Connections to representations, bundles and...