James Colliander

James Colliander is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. He is also the cofounder of the International Interactive Computing Collaboration (2i2c), the educational technology company Crowdmark and Callysto, a project designed to improve computational thinking for students and teachers in grades 5-12. His research addresses dynamical aspects of solutions of Hamiltonian partial differential equations, especially the non-linear Schrödinger equation.

Dr. Colliander obtained his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1997 and took postdoctoral positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and the University of California, Berkeley, before taking a faculty position at the University of Toronto, where he held a full professorship from 2007-2015. He is a recipient of a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2003), the McLean Award (2007) and the Outstanding Teaching Award in Arts and Science (2010) from the University of Toronto. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Dr. Colliander served as the PIMS Deputy Director from 2015, before becoming its Director in 2016. Under Colliander’s leadership, PIMS has been able to expand the role of scientific computing in the Mathematics community. Dr. Colliander secured Cancode funding for the Callysto and Syzygy projects--PIMS’ largest award for a single project to date. Syzygy (https://intro.syzygy.ca) facilitated data and computationally intensive research for researchers across western Canada. Callysto (https://www.callysto.ca/callysto/) made computational tools accessible in classrooms across western Canada, making it easier for new generations of scientists to acquire data and coding skills earlier in their schooling.

During his term, Dr. Colliander supported industry-academy collaborations through the bc-data events and the Math to Power Industry workshop. He received the 2021 Arthur Beaumont Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his outstanding service to the applied and industrial math community in Canada as PIMS director.  Dr. Colliander has been instrumental in reshaping the leadership of PIMS to a more distributed model and in the development of more network-wide activities. His term as ended in June 2021.