Brian Marcus Appointed Interim Deputy Director of PIMS

  • Date: 05/24/2016

The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of Brian Marcus as Interim Deputy Director of PIMS for a one-year period, starting on July 1, 2016. Professor Marcus is a faculty member at the UBC Department of Mathematics and has been an active member of the PIMS community for many years.

Brian received his PhD in mathematics in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Rufus Bowen. He has been an IBM Watson Postdoctoral Fellow, associate professor of mathematics at UNC Chapel Hill and a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He has been professor of mathematics at UBC since 2002, serving as department head from 2002 to 2007. He has held visiting and adjunct associate professor positions at UC Berkeley, UC, Santa Cruz and Stanford University and served as principal PhD supervisor for students at UNC Chapel Hill, UC, Santa Cruz, Stanford University and UBC. He has published more than seventy research papers in ergodic theory, symbolic dynamics and information theory, and co-authored “An Introduction to Symbolic Dynamics and Coding" (Cambridge University Press, 1995, 1999) with Doug Lind. He holds twelve US patents, is an IEEE Fellow, and shared the 1993 Leonard J. Abraham Prize Paper award of the IEEE Communications Society with Paul Siegel and Jack Wolf.
 
PIMS Interim Director, Martin Barlow stated, “We are delighted that Brian has decided to step into this role and know that his significant experience in leadership and academics will be a tremendous asset over the next year. We thank James Colliander for his past year as deputy director as we prepare to welcome him into his new role as director.”