Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences - PIMS

Note: The positions listed were held during the person's term on the PIMS SRP.

 

Alejandro Adem CEO and Scientific Director of Mitacs

Dr Adem 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. In February of 2015 he became the CEO and Scientific Director of Mitacs

 

David Aldous Professor of Statistics, University of California at Berkeley. David Aldous is Professor in the Statistics Dept at U.C. Berkeley, since 1979. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1977. He is the author of "Probability Approximations via the Poisson Clumping Heuristic" and (with Jim Fill) of a notorious unfinished online work "Reversible Markov Chains and Random Walks on Graphs". His research in mathematical probability has covered weak convergence, exchangeability, Markov chain mixing times, continuum random trees, stochastic coalescence and spatial random networks. A central theme has been the study of large finite random structures, obtaining asymptotic behavior as the size tends to infinity via consideration of some suitable infinite random structure. He was founding editor of the journal "Probability Surveys". He has recently become interested in articulating critically what mathematical probability says about the real world. Aldous is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

 

Martin Barlow is a leading figure in probability and an expert in diffusion on fractals and other disordered media. His work has been important in such diverse fields as partial differential equations, including major progress on the De Giorgi conjecture, stochastic differential equations, the mathematical finance of electricity pricing, filtration enlargement and branching measure diffusions.

Barlow's awards include the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize, the Jeffery-Williams Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society, the Rollo Davidson Prize from Cambridge University and the Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society. He has been a leader of the international probability community, an organizer of numerous conferences and editor of several probability journals. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, The Royal Society of Canada, The Royal Society(London) and the American Mathematical Society.

 

Kai Behrend Professor of Mathematics, UBC. 

Prof. Behrend 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. Prof. Behrend served on the SRP until Summer 2015.

 

Carl de Boor Professor Emeritus in Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

An expert in numerical analysis, Dr. de Boor is the author of more than 150 papers and four books. In 2003, he won the U.S. National Medal of Science. 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 was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2005.

 

Liliana Borcea Professor of Mathematics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, received her PhD in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics at Stanford University, in 1996. From 1996-1997 she was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics at California Institute of Technology, and between 1997-2013 she was in the Computational and Applied Mathematics department at Rice University. She moved to University of Michigan in 2013. Her research interests are in stochastic methods with application to wave propagation and imaging in random media, in inverse problems and in the multi-scale analysis of diffusion in high contrast media. Examples of applications are in underwater acoustics, electromagnetic wave propagation and imaging in the atmosphere, groundwater flow, solute transport and controlled source electromagnetic oil and gas exploration. She is a member of the SIAM council (2014-2017). She served as the chair of the SIAM Imaging Science activity group 2010-2011 and is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Academy of Finland, for the Center of Excellence in Inverse Problems Research, 2012-2017. She is on the editorial boards of the SIAM Journal on Multiscale Modeling and Simulations, the SIAM Journal on Uncertainty Quantification and on the international advisory panel of the journal Inverse Problems.

 

David Boyd Professor of Mathematics, University of British Columbia

David Boyd received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1966. At that time he worked in harmonic analysis and in particular interpfolation theory for rearrangement invariant spaces. Subsequently his work shifted into number theory, particularly the theory of Pisot and Salem numbers and Mahler's measure. He is particularly interested in the role of computation in pure mathematics. After his Ph.D., he spent a year at the University of Alberta, then moved to the California Institute of Technology where he spent the next four years, and finally moving to the University of British Columbia where he has been a professor of mathematics since 1974. He was awarded the 1978 E.W.R. Steacie Prize in Science for his work on Pisot sequences and Salem numbers. He was the Canadian Mathematical Society's Coxeter-James lecturer for 1979 and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1980.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2001.

 

David Brillinger Professor of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley

David Brillinger's research is in statistical inference for and their applications to stochastic processes. In particular this involves him in statistical methods for random processes and in science and engineering. He has made contributions to the theory and application of statistics in subject areas including neurophysiology (the analysis of neural spike trains), seismology, and the modeling animal tracks. He is the author of Time Series Analysis: Data Analysis and Theory, former editor of the International Statistical Review, former President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the Statistical Society of Canada. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He received a D.Sc. degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1999 and a D.Math. degree from the University of Waterloo in 2003.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1999-2005.

 

David Brydges Professor of Mathematics, University of British Columbia

David Brydges received the PhD in 1976 at the University of Michigan under the direction of Paul Federbush. He held a postdoctoral position at Rockefeller University working for James Glimm. In 1978 he became Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. He was promoted to Full Professor of Mathematics and Physics in 1981 and became Commonwealth Chair in 1996. He was recently appointed as a Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia.

Brydges received the Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship in 1982. He has given lectures throughout the world including courses in the Troisiéme Cycle at Lausanne in 1992, Centre Emile Borel in 1998 and the Nach Diplom program at ETH, Switzerland. He is the President of the International Association of Mathematical Physics.

His interests are centered on the renormalization group with applications to quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and probability.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2002-2007.

 

Vladimir Chernousov Professor of Mathematics, University of Alberta

Vladimir Chernusov 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 was been a member of the PIMS SRP from 2009-2013.

 

Anne Condon Professor of Computer Science, University of British Columbia

Anne Condon is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and is the NSERC/General Motors Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for British Columbia and the Yukon. She received her Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Washington, Seattle and B.Sc. (1982) from University College, Cork, Ireland. Her Ph.D. thesis on game-like computational models won an ACM Distinguished Dissertation award. She also received an NSF National Young Investigator Award (1992) and an NSF Visiting Professorships for Women Award (1996) to support her work.

Dr. Condon's research focuses on the power of randomness in computation. Through classification of randomized and nondeterministic complexity classes, her work has led to improved understanding of what types of intractable problems can be approximated and/or computed efficiently, notably PSPACE-hard problems and also problems in probabilistic planning. Dr. Condon also works on computational prediction of RNA secondary structure, and on verification of cache coherence protocols.

She was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2005-2007.

 

James Colliander PIMS Director, Professor of Mathematics at University of British Columbia,

James Colliander Graduated from Macalester College in 1989. He worked for two years at the United States Naval Research Laboratory on fiber optic sensors and then went to graduate school to study mathematics receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1997 under Jean Bourgain. Colliander was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and spent semesters at the University of Chicago, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. His research mostly addresses dynamical aspects of solutions of Hamiltonian partial differential equations, especially non-linear Schrödinger equation. He is also the Founder/CEO of an education technology company called Crowdmark, a collaborative grading and analytics platform.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2015-2020.

 

Walter Craig Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Canada Research Chair of Mathematical Analysis and its Applications, McMaster University

Walter Craig 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 was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2007-2013.

 

Brian Conrey Executive Director, American Institute of Mathematics

Brian Conrey is the founding Executive Director of the American Institute of Mathematics. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1980. He has served on the faculties of the University of Illinois and Oklahoma State University, and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study four times. He is also a Professor at Bristol University and a Consulting Professor at Stanford University. He serves as an editor of the Journal of Number Theory and is also active in Math Circles and Math Teachers’ Circles. His research interests are analytic number theory and random matrix theory.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2020-2021.

 

Ivar Ekeland Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Economics

Ivar Ekeland is the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Economics at the University of British Columbia. He is a former President of Universite Paris-Dauphine, and a former Director of the research centres CEREMADE and Institute Finance-Dauphine. He has received prizes from the French Academy of Sciences, the French Mathematical Society, and the Belgian Academy of Sciences. He is a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and he holds honorary doctorates from UBC and from the University of Saint-Petersburg for Economics and Finance. Dr. Ekeland is the founding editor of the "Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincare-Analyse nonlineaire" and he sits on the editorial board of many other publications. He has also written several books which are reflections on, or popularization of, mathematics. For these contributions, Dr. Ekeland was awarded the "Prix Jean Rostand" by the Association des Ecrivains Scientifiques de France and the "Prix d'Alembert" by the Societe Mathematique de France. He is also a regular contributor to the journal "Nature" as well as to the magazine "Pour la Science". He has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2003.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2003 until he stepped down as PIMS Director in June 2008 .

 

Yakov Eliashberg Herald L and Caroline L Ritch Professor at Stanford University Has research interests in symplectic and contact geometry, several complex variables, singularity theory and low-dimensional topology. He is one of the founders of symplectic topology, a new and active area of research which emerged in 1980s and found important applications in other areas of mathematics and theoretical physics.

Professor Eliashberg was born in 1946 in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Russia. He received his doctoral degree in Leningrad University in 1972 under the direction of V A Rokhlin, and in the same year he joined Syktyvkar University in northern Soviet Union as an Associate Professor. In 1988 he emigrated to the United States and in 1989 became a Professor at Stanford University. He is a Member of US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995, was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 2001, awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, in 2009 and in in 2013 received the Heinz Hopf Prize from the ETH, Zurich, Switzerland.

 

Richard Ewing Professor of Applied Mathematics, Texas A & M University

Richard Ewing is Dean of the College of Science and Professor of Mathematics and Engineering at Texas A & M University. He is also Director of the Institute for Scientific Computation and the Academy for Advanced Telecommunications & Learning Technologies at Texas A & M. Prof. Ewing is an expert in scientific computation. His research deals with the multitude of problems that arise from numerical simulation and modeling of multiphase flow and transport in porous media as applied to ground water contaminants and reservoir modeling. He has an extensive background in consulting/advising with the public and private sector especially the petroleum industry.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2001.

 

John Friedlander Professor of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Toronto at Scarborough

John Friedlander is one of the world's foremost analytic number theorists, and is a recognized leader in the theory of prime numbers and L-functions. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1965, an M.A. from the University of Waterloo in 1966, and a Ph.D. from Penn State in 1972. He was a lecturer at MIT in 1974-76, and has been on the faculty of the University of Toronto since 1977, where he served as chair during 1987-91. He has also spent several years at the Institute for Advanced Study where he has collaborated with E. Bombieri and many others. Dr. Friedlander is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1988), an invited lecturer at the 1994 ICM in Zurich, and he delivered the CMS Jeffery-Williams Lecture in 1999. He has contributed significantly to mathematics in other ways, especially in Canada, through his role at NSERC (Mathematics GSC, 1991-94), as Mathematics Convenor of the Royal Society of Canada (1990-93), and as a Council member (1989-95) and Scientific Advisory Panel member (1996-2000) of the Fields Institute. He has served on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and the Canadian Mathematics Bulletin for the past four years.

He was been a member of the PIMS SRP from 2005 - 2009.

 

Nassif Ghoussoub Professor of Mathematics, University of British Columbia

Nassif Ghoussoub obtained his Doctorat d'état in 1979 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France and is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. His present research interests are in non-linear analysis, optimization and partial differential equations. He was the recipient of the Coxeter-James prize in 1990, of a Killam senior fellowship in 1992 and has been a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1993.

He was chair of NSERC's grant selection committee for mathematics in 1995-1996 and vice-president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 1994-1996. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics from 1993-2002 and is currently on the editorial board of various international journals.

He was chair of the PIMS SRP from 1996 (the start of PIMS) until he stepped down as PIMS Director in September 2003.

 

Randy Goebel Professor of Computer Science, University of Alberta

R.G. (Randy) Goebel is a professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He received his B.Sc. (Computer Science), M.Sc. (Computing Science), and Ph.D. (Computer Science) from the Universities of Regina, Alberta, and British Columbia, respectively. Professor Goebel's research is focused on the theory and application of intelligent systems. His theoretical work on abduction, hypothetical reasoning and belief revision is well known, and his recent application of practical belief revision to scheduling and Web mining is now having industrial impact. Randy has previously held faculty appointments at the University of Waterloo and the University of Tokyo, and is actively involved in academic and industrial collaborative research projects in Canada, Australia, Europe and Japan.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2002 - 2009.

 

Ronald Graham Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego

Ronald Graham is the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor of Computer and Information Science in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of California at San Diego. He is also currently President of the Mathematical Association of America and has served as the Treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences since 1996. He was also the President of the American Mathematical Society from 1993 to 1995, and served as Chief Scientist of AT&T Labs until 1999. Graham's academic awards include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, and recipient of the Polya Prize in Combinatorics, the Euler Medal in Combinatorics, a Lester Ford Award of the Math. Assoc. of America, a Carl Allendorfer Award of the Math. Assoc. of America, and the Leroy Steele Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Mathematical Society in 2002. He has also served as President of the International Jugglers Association. Graham's current mathematical interests include combinatorics, number theory, graph theory, discrete and computational geometry, design and analysis of algorithms, and applications thereof.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2005.

 

Peter Guttorp Professor of Statistics, University of Washington and Director of the Northwest Research Center for Statistics and the Environment,

Prof. Guttorp 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. Prof. Guttorp served on the SRP until Summer 2015.

 

Pavol Hell Professor of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University,

Pavol Hell 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.

 

Wolfgang J.R. Hoefer Professor of Computer and Electrical Engineering, University of Victoria

Wolfgang J.R. Hoefer is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria and holds the NSERC/MPR Teltech Industrial Research Chair in RF-Engineering. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and of the Advanced Systems Institute (ASI) of British Columbia.

His expertise lies in computational electromagnetics, numerical modeling of electromagnetic fields and structures, microwave and millimeter-wave circuit design, and microwave measurements. Prof. Hoefer has been a visiting scientist or professor at AEG-Telefunken in Germany, the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, and the Universities of Grenoble, Rome-Tor Vergata, Nice-Sofia Antipolis, Munich, and Duisburg. He is the managing editor of the International Journal of Numerical Modelling since 1988.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-1999.

 

Philip Holmes Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Applied and Computational Mathematics has been at Princeton since 1994. He directed the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics until 1997, and again in 2010-11.

Dr. Holmes is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and of the American Mathematical Society. He has held various positions including Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell (81-86); Chaire Aisenstadt at the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques, Universite de Montreal (85-86); Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (88-89). In 2001 he was elected an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Holmes is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and of the American Mathematical Society. He has held various positions including Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell (81-86); Chaire Aisenstadt at the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques, Universite de Montreal (85-86); Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (88-89). In 2001 he was elected an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

 

George "Bud" Homsy Deputy Director of PIMS UBC

Bud Homsy's 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.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2010-2014. 

 

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.

 

Richard Karp Professor of Computer Science, University of California

Richard M. Karp was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1935 and was educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1959. From 1959 to 1968he was a member of the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. From 1968 to 1994 he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1988 to 1995 he was also associated with the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. In 1994 he retired from Berkeley and was named University Professor (Emeritus). In 1995 he moved to the University of Washington, where he has appointments in Computer Science and Molecular Biotechnology. The unifying theme in Karp's work has been the study of combinatorial algorithms. His 1972 paper "Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems," demonstrated the wide applicability of the concept of NP-completeness. Much of his subsequent work has concerned the development of parallel algorithms, the probabilistic analysis of combinatorial optimization problems,and the construction of randomized algorithms for combinatorial problems. His current research is concerned with strategies for sequencing the human genome. Karp has received the U.S. National Medal of Science,Turing Award (ACM), the Fulkerson Prize(AMS and Math. Programming Society), the von Neumann Theory Prize(ORSA-TIMS), the Lanchester Prize (ORSA) the von Neumann Lectureship (SIAM) and the Distinguished Teaching Award (Berkeley). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and holds four honorary degrees.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2001.

 

Richard Kenyon Professor of Mathematics, Brown University

Richard Kenyon 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 was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2006-2009.

 

Sándor Kovács Craig McKibben and Sarah Merner Endowed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington

Dr Kovács received his Ph.D. in 1995 at the University of Utah under the direction of János Kollár. After being a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at M.I.T., and an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago he joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 2000. Dr. Kovács has held visiting positions at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto (Japan), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley (California), the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest (Hungary), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (New Jersey), and the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Dr. Kovács's research is in higher dimensional algebraic geometry, he is especially interested in questions related to moduli theory, singularities and vanishing theorems for cohomology groups. He received the Rényi Kató Prize of the Bolyai János Mathematical Society (Hungary) and has been the recipient of an AMS Centennial Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Simons Fellowship.

Prof. Kovács was a member of the PIMS SRP between 2015 and 2019.

 

Bryna Kra Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University

Bryna Kra is the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University. She earned her doctorate from Stanford University and held positions at the University of Jerusalem in Israel, the Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France, at the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, and Pennsylvania State University, before joining the faculty at Northwestern University in 2004. She was awarded the Centennial Fellowship of the American Mathematical Society in 2006 and the Conant Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 2010, and was elected an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012. In 2016, she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2019 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Kra works in ergodic theory and dynamical systems, particularly on problems motivated by combinatorics and number theory.

She was a member of the PIMS SRP between 2020 and 2021.

 

Stephen Kudla Professor of Mathematics and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto

Stephen Kudla 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.

 

Alistair Lachlan Professor of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University

Alistair Lachlan obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1964 and is currently a professor of mathematics at Simon Fraser University. Prof. Lachlan was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1974. He has served as the Vice-President of the Canadian Mathematical Society (1985-1987), was a member of the NSERC math GSC (1984-1987), was a member of the selection panel for speakers in Mathematical Logic at the 1990 ICM, and served on the steering committee for the CRM (1991-1995). He is and has been an editor for a number of journals including annals of pure and applied logic and the lecture notes in logic.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2001.

 

Gregory F. Lawler Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago

Gregory F. Lawler 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

 

Mark Lewis Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Biology, Killam Research Fellowship holder, Director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Alberta received his BSc from the University of Victoria in 1987 and D. Phil from Oxford in 1990. After a postdoc at the University of Washington he joined faculty at the University of Utah in 1992 before moving to the University of Alberta in 2001. He has held visiting positions at Imperial College, Princeton, Minnesota, and Oxford. His research involves mathematical modeling of biological processes, involving interplay of science and mathematics, where ideas from each lead to advances in the other. Professor Lewis's work develops techniques in stochastic processes, dynamical systems and partial differential equations and has led to significant advances, for example, in modeling territorial pattern formation in wolf populations, predicting population spread in biological invasions like the West Nile virus, and assessing the effect of habitat fragmentation on species survival. Research prizes include the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society Research Prize and the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize for Exceptional Research in Mathematics.

 

Michael C. Mackey Joseph Morley Drake Professor of Physiology, Director of the Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics in Physiology and Medicine

Michael C. Mackey 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.
Michael Mackey

Dr. Mackey was been a member of the PIMS SRP from 2009-2013.

 

Bernard J. Matkowsky John Evans Chair in Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University

Bernard J. Matkowsky presently holds the John Evans Chair in Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1966. He was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute until 1978 and has been at Northwestern University since then. He is the editor of 7 journals (SIAM J. Appl. Math., European J. Appl. Math., Int'l. J. Wave Motion, Random and Computational Dynamics, J. Materials Synthesis and Processing, Int'l. J. SHS, Applied Math. Letters) and one book series (Springer Appl. Math. Sci. series). His honors include being a Fulbright-Hayes Fellow in 1972-1973 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1982-1983. His research areas include asymptotic and perturbation methods for ordinary and partial differential equations, nonlinear stability and bifurcation theory, stochastic differential equations, and applications to fluid dynamics, elasticity, combustion, flame propagation, and solid state physics.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2001.

 

Marni Mishna Deputy Director of PIMS and Professor of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University

Originally from Edmonton, Marni successively obtained degrees in pure mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Simon Fraser University and the Université du Québec à Montréal. She held an NSERC Postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bordeaux and the Fields Institute in Toronto before returning to Simon Fraser as faculty in 2005. Her distinctions include an NSERC University Faculty Award, and numerous invited positions in France. She has served on the NSERC Scholarships and Fellowships committee

Marni is an expert in combinatorics. Her research investigates interactions between discrete structures and many diverse areas such as representation theory, functional equations, and algebraic geometry. Her specialty is the development of analytic tools to study the large-scale behaviour of discrete objects. She is a leader within the international combinatorics community, and has organized several major conferences, workshops and schools.

Marni was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2019-2020

 

 

Douglas Nychka Director of the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Douglas Nychka is a statistical scientist with an interest in the problems posed by geophysical data sets or, more generally, by substantive problems in science and engineering. His current interests are in quantifying the uncertainty of numerical experiments that simulate the Earth's present and possible future climate. His statistical expertise is in spline and spatial statistical methods especially as they are applied to large geophysical data sets and numerical models. He has a Ph. D. in Statistics (1983) from the University of Wisconsin and he subsequently spent 14 years as a faculty member at North Carolina State University. He assumed leadership of the Geophysical Statistics Project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1997, a program funded by the National Science Foundation to develop collaborative research and training between statistics and the geosciences. In 2004 he became Director of the Institute of Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe). IMAGe is an interdisciplinary component of NCAR with a focus on transferring innovative mathematical models and tools to the geosciences. He has received the Jerry Sacks Award for Multidisciplinary Research (2004), the Distinguished Achievement Award Section on Statistics in the Environment (2013), the Achievement Award for the International Statistics and Climatology Meeting (2013). He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2015-2021

.

 

Robert V. Moody Professor of Mathematics, University of Alberta

Robert V. Moody is professor of mathematics at the University of Alberta. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1966 and spent most of his academic career at the University of Saskatchewan before coming to Alberta in 1989. He is best known for the discovery, independently with V. Kac, and subsequent investigations of the Kac-Moody Algebras, for which he was awarded the 1994-1996 Eugene Wigner Medal jointly with Kac. He has presented both the Coxeter-James Prize Lecture (1978) and the Jeffrey-Williams Prize Lecture (1995) to the Canadian Mathematical Society. He has served nationally on the Scientific Advisory Boards of both the Centre de Recherches de Mathematique and the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences, and on the Council of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2004.

 

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

Michael L. Overton 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).

 

George Papanicolaou Professor of Mathematics, Stanford University

George Papanicolaou 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.

 

Raman Parimala, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Atlanta received her Master's degree at Stella Maris College, Chennai and her Ph. D. degree in 1976, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She was a Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research before she moved to Emory Univeristy. She has held visiting positions at several institutions including the MSRI, Berkeley, EPFL, Lausanne, ETH, Zurich and Université Paris-Sud, Orsay.

Dr. Parimala has given a number of special addresses including the Coxeter lectures at the Fields Institute, Toronto in May 2013; Noether lecture of the AWM, at the joint AMS-MAA national meeting at San Diego, January 2013 and the Bernoulli Lecture at EPFL Lausanne, December, 2012. She also gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Hyderabad, 2010 and a sectional invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Zurich, 1994.

Dr. Parimala is on the editorial boards of a number of Mathematics Journals and is currently the editor in chief of the Journal of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society. Her research interests include quadratic forms, Brauer groups, algebraic groups and homogeneous spaces.

 

Linda Petzold Professor of Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Program, University of California at Santa Barbara,

Linda Petzold 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.

 

Nicholas Pippenger Professor of Computer Science, University of British Columbia

Nicholas Pippenger received his Ph.D. from MIT in Electrical Engineering in 1974. Prior to joining UBC Computer Science department as a professor in 1988, he was a staff member at IBM for sixteen years and at Draper Laboratories for three years. For his last two years at IBM he was an IBM Fellow. His other distinctions include a 1991 UBC Killam Research Prize, a 1983 IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, and a 1981 IBM Outstanding Innovation Award. He has published over 90 research articles in the theory of computation and communication and discrete mathematics.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2001.

 

Ian F. Putnam Professor of Mathematics, University of Victoria

Ian F. Putnam received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. He was an NSERC University Research Fellow at Dalhousie University before moving to the University of Victoria where he is currently Canada Research Chair in Operator Algebras and Dynamical Systems in the department of mathematics and statistics. He has received the Israel Halperin Prize and the Andre Aisenstadt prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1999-2007.

 

Anthony Quas, Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Victoria and PIMS Site Director

Anthony Quas is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Victoria. He is an expert in ergodic theory and dynamical systems. Key tools in his research are probability and linear algebra. He is the Site Director of PIMS at the University of Victoria, and served as Interim Deputy Director of PIMS for the academic year 2018-19.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2019-2020.

 

Alexander Razborov, Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor in Computer Science, University of Chicago. Alexander Razborov received his B.Sc in mathematics from Moscow State University and PhD from the Steklov Mathematical Institute (advisor: S. Adian). Currently he is an Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, with part-time appointments at Steklov Mathematical Institute and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Dr. Razborov's research interests span several areas in Theoretical Computer Science, including computational complexity, proof complexity, quantum computing and computational complexity, as well as related mathematical areas, notably Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorial Group Theory. He received the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize in 1990, the Godel Prize in 2007 and the David P. Robbins Prize in 2013. Dr. Razborov is a member of the Academia Europea (since 1993) and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 2000).

 

Bruce Reed Professor of Computer Science, Canada Research Chair in Graph Theory, McGill University

Bruce Reed received his doctorate from McGill University in 1986. He has been a faculty member at the University of Waterloo and Carnegie Mellon University and a charge de recherche and directeur de recherche of the CNRS in France. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Grapht Theory at McGill University. Professor Reed's research interests lie at the intersection of computer science and mathematics. He is particularly interested in graph theory and discrete stochastic processes. He has given invited talks around the world, including at the 2002 ICM in Beijing.

He was been a member of the PIMS SRP from 2007 - 2009.

 

Nancy Reid Professor of Statistics, University of Toronto

Nancy Reid is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto. She received her Bachelor of Mathematics in 1974 from the University of Waterloo, her M.Sc. in 1976 from the University of British Columbia, and her Ph.D. in 1979 from Stanford University. She held an academic appointment at the UBC from 1980-1986 and has held visiting appointments at Imperial College, London, Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin. She has served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the Statistical Society of Canada; and as vice-president of the International Statistical Institute. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a recipient of the Presidents' Award of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, the first recipient of the Canadian Mathematical Society's Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics' Wald lecturer for 2000. Her research interests include inferential statistics with special emphasis on asymptotic theory for likelihood based inference, design of experiments, and applications of statistics to health and environment.

She was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2005 - 2009.

 

Bob Russell Professor of Applied Mathematics, Simon Fraser University

Bob Russell received his Ph.D. in 1971 at the University of New Mexico under the direction of Lawrence Shampine. In 1971, Dr. Russell became Assistant Professor at Colorado State University and in 1972 he moved to Simon Fraser University. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1981. He has held numerous visiting positions throughout the world, including at Stanford, University of Auckland and Imperial College (as an SERC Fellow). Dr. Russell's travels include serving as an Invited Scholar at the USSR and Chinese Academies of Science and as a plenary speaker at SIAM's Dynamical Systems Conference in 2000. His journal editorships have included SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis and SIAM Journal for Scientific Computing. He is a founding member and past Vice-President of CAIMS (Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society), has served two terms on NSERC's Grant Selection Committee in Computer Science, is on IMACS Board of Directors, and is a Canadian representative for ICIAM. His field of research is scientific computing, with special emphasis on the numerical solution of PDEs and ODEs. He is particularly interested in dynamical systems and computational methods which preserve qualitative features of solutions of differential equations. This has recently been in the context of developing mathematical software using adaptive gridding techniques.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2002 - 2009.

 

Donald Saari Professor of Mathematics and of Economics, University of California at Irvine

Donald Saari 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 was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2005-2009.

 

Michael J. Shelley, Lilian and George Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics, Professor of Mathematics and Neural Science, Co-Director, Applied Mathematics Laboratory. Michael J. Shelley is an American applied mathematician who works on the modeling and simulation of complex systems arising in physics and biology. This has included free-boundary problems in fluids and materials science, singularity formation in partial differential equations, modeling visual perception in the primary visual cortex, dynamics of complex and active fluids, cellular biophysics, and fluid-structure interaction problems such as the flapping of flags, stream-lining in nature, and flapping flight. He is also the co-founder and co-director of the Courant Institute's Applied Mathematics Lab.

Shelley was born in La Junta, Colorado (USA). He holds a BA in Mathematics from the University of Colorado (1981) and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona (1985). He was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, and then joined the faculty of mathematics at the University of Chicago. In 1992 he joined the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University where he is the George and Lilian Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics. He is also a Professor of Neuroscience (NYU) and Professor of Mechanical Engineering (NYU-Poly). Recent honors include Distinguished Chair of the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences(2001), Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (2007) and the Inaugural Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2009)

 

Gordan Slade Professor of Mathematics, University of British Columbia

Gordon Slade received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, in Mathematics, in 1984. He is currently a professor in the Mathematics department at University of British Columbia. He was the 1995 Coxeter-James Lecturer of the Canadian Mathematical Society, and was one of five Canadian mathematicians invited to give addresses at the 1994 International Conference of Mathematicians in Zurich.

In joint work with T. Hara, he has given a rigorous proof of the long-standing conjecture that percolation (and also other important models in statistical physics) exhibit mean-field behaviour in high dimensions.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 1996-2001.

 

Kannan Soundararajan, Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Mathematics Research Center (MRC) at Stanford University. Soundararajan received his BS degree from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D, supervised by Peter Sarnak, from Princeton University in 1998. After postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan, before moving to Stanford University in 2006. His main research interests lie in number theory, and in particular in multiplicative number theory and L-functions, but he is broadly interested in many problems in number theory, combinatorics, probability and analysis

Soundararajan has received the Salem Prize, the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, the Ostrowski Prize, the Infosys Prize, and a Simons Investigator Award. He gave an invited lecture at the ICM in 2010.

 

Chuu-lian Terng, Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Irvine

Chuu-Lian Terng received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1976. She is currently a professor at The University of California at Irvine, and was previously a professor at Northeastern University. Her research interests include the geometry and topology of submanifolds, and geometric aspects of soliton equations. She received a Sloan Fellowship in 1980, and a Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1996. She gave an AMS invited lecture at the 1999 Joint Mathematics Annual Meeting, an AMS-MAA invited Lecture at the 2011 Joint Mathematics Annual meeting, and an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006. Professor Terng served on the SRP until Summer 2015.

 

Elizabeth Thompson Professor of Statistics, University of Washington

Elizabeth Thompson received a B.A. in Mathematics (1970), a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics (1971), and Ph.D. in Statistics (1974), from Cambridge University, UK. In 1974-5 she was a NATO/SRC postdoc in the Department of Genetics, Stanford University. From 1975-1981 she was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and from 1981-1985 was Fellow and Director of Studies in Mathematics at Newnham College. From 1976-1985 she was a University Lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in December 1985, as a Professor of Statistics. Since 1988, Dr. Thompson has been Professor also of Biostatistics, and since Spring 2000, she is also an Adjunct Professor in Genetics (now Genome Sciences) at the University of Washington, and an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University. She served as Chair of the Department of Statistics from 1989-1994.

In 1981, she was elected a member of the International Statistical Institute, and in 1988, she was awarded an Sc.D. degree by the University of Cambridge. In 1994, she gave the R.A.Fisher Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto. In 1996, she gave the Neyman Lecture (IMS) at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Chicago. In 1998, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001, she received the inaugural Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute for Statistical Science, and was also awarded the Weldon Prize, an international prize for contributions to Biometric Science awarded by the University of Oxford. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002-2003.

Dr. Thompson's research interest is in the development of methods for inference from genetic data, and particularly from patterns of genome sharing observed among members of large and large and complex pedigree structures, whether of plants, animals, or humans. Questions of interest range from human genetic linkage analysis to gene extinction in highly endangered species, and from inference of relationship to inferences of the genetic basis of traits, Her current focus is on developing research and education in Statistical Genetics at the University of Washington.

She was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2002-2005.

 

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 was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2002 until 2011

 

Tatiana Toro Professor of Mathematics, University of Washington

Tatiana Toro 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).

 

Gunther Uhlmann Professor of Mathematics, University of Washington

Gunther Uhlmann received his Ph.D. in 1976 at MIT under the direction of Victor Guillemin. He held postdoctoral positions at Harvard, Courant Institute and MIT. In 1980 he became Assistant Professor at MIT and in 1985 he moved to the University of Washington as an Associate Professor. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1987.

Uhlmann was awarded the Annual National Prize of Venezuela in Mathematics in 1982. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship in 1984 and a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship in 2001. He has given numerous lectures throughout the world including an invited address at the Portland meeting of the AMS in 1991, the CBMS-NSF lectures on "Inverse Problems and Non-Destructive Evaluation" in 1995, an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998 and the PIMS Distinguished Lectures at UBC in 2002.

His current interest is inverse problems, in particular inverse boundary value problems and inverse scattering problems. In these problems, one attempts to determine internal parameters of a medium by making measurements at the boundary of the medium or by remote observations.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2002-2007.

 

Jun Cheng-Wei Professor of Mathematics and Canada Research Chair (Tier I), University of British Columbia

Prof. Wei received his PhD from University of Minnesota in 1994. He was a postdoctoral fellow at SISSA (Trieste, Italy) from 1994 to 1995. In 1995 he joined the department of mathematics at Chinese University of Hong Kong where he held the Wei Lun Chair Professor from 2011 to 2013. He then moved to University of British Columbia in 2013 as a CRC in Nonlinear Partial Differential Equation. He has published extensively and his research covers both pure and applied mathematics, ranging from De Giorgi and Liouville type properties of nonlinear partial differential equations, concentration phenomena, nonlinear analysis, geometric scalar curvature problems, to reaction-diffusion systems, diblock and triblock copolymer problems, phase-transitions in material sciences and pattern formation in mathematical biology. He is an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Korea, 2014, a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians, Beijing, 2010, and a Senior Croucher Fellow in 2005.

Dr Wei was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2015 till 2019

 

Hugh Williams Professor of Mathematics, University of Calgary

Hugh C. Williams holds the iCORE Chair in Algorithmic Number Theory and Computing at the University of Calgary and is a professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at that institution. His main research interests are in computational number theory, cryptography and the design and development of special-purpose hardware devices. His work in computational number theory extends from analyzing the complexity of number theoretic algorithms to the actual implementation and testing of such algorithms.

Dr. Williams has published more than 130 refereed journal papers, 20 refereed conference papers and 20 books (or chapters therein). From 1983-85 he held a national Killam Research Fellowship. He has been an associate editor for Mathematics of Computation since 1978 and is also a member of the editorial boards of two other journals. Dr. Williams has also served on the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Grant Selection Committees for both Computing and Information Science (1972-1975) and Pure and Applied Mathematics (1991-1994), and chaired the latter from 1993-1994. He has also been a member of the Steacie Awards Selection Committee.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2002-2007.

 

Efim Zelmanov Professor of Mathematics, University of California, San Diego

Efim Zelmanov is the Rita L. Atkinson Chair in Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He attended Novosibirsk State University, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1980 having had his research supervised by Shirshov and Bokut. His Ph.D. thesis completely changed the whole of the subject of Jordan algebras by extending results from the classical theory of finite dimensional Jordan algebras to infinite dimensional Jordan algebras. Dr. Zelmanov described this work on Jordan algebras in his invited lecture to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Warsaw in 1983. In 1980 Dr. Zelmanov was appointed as a Junior Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR at Novosibirsk. By 1986 he had been promoted to Leading Researcher. In 1987 Dr. Zelmanov solved one of the big open questions in the theory of Lie algebras. He proved that the Engel identity ad y(n)= 0 implies that the algebra is necessarily nilpotent. This was a classical result for finite dimensional Lie algebras but Dr. Zelmanov proved that the result also held also for infinite dimensional Lie algebras. In 1990 Dr. Zelmanov was appointed a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held this appointment until 1994 when he was appointed to the University of Chicago. In 1995 he spent the year at Yale University. In 1991, Dr. Zelmanov went on to settle one of the most fundamental results in the theory of groups: the restricted Burnside problem, which had occupied group theorists throughout the 20th century. In 1994 Dr. Zelmanov was awarded a Fields Medal for this work at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1994. He is also a recipient of an Andre Aisenstadt Prize and a College de France Medal. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2005 - 2009.