Board of Directors
The Board of Directors is elected from among the Members of the Corporation. It meets four times per year to ensure that the Institute is fulfilling its mandate for research, mathematics education and collaboration with external bodies.
Board of Directors 2017-18
| Chair, Sheila Embleton | York University |
| Vice Chair, Philip Siller | BroadRiver Asset Management. L.P. and Hexagram |
| Director, Ian Hambleton | Fields Institute |
| Deputy Director, Huaxiong Huang | Fields Institute |
| Lisa Baiton | CPPIB |
| Laurent Bernardin | Maplesoft |
| Eoghan Burns | Canada Life |
| Tom Duever | Ryerson University |
| Cindy Forbes | Manulife |
| Ian Goulden | University of Waterloo |
| Arvind Gupta | University of British Columbia |
| Ted Hsu | Former MP, Science Advocate, Finance |
| William Janeway | Warburg Pincus |
| Niky Kamran | McGill University |
| Kim McAuley | Queen's University |
| Siobhan Roberts | Journalist and Author |
| Dan Rosen | D1g1t Inc. |
| Pekka Sinervo | University of Toronto |
| Ravi Vakil | Stanford University |
| Michael Zerbs | Scotiabank |
Sheila Embleton, Chair, is the President of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. Prior to this appointment, she was the Vice-President Academic of York University in Toronto, from 2000 to 2009. Previously, she served as Associate Dean of York's Faculty of Arts. She is a currently a Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts. Born in Ottawa, Dr. Embleton graduated from Lisgar Collegiate Institute, then attended the University of Toronto, where she earned her BSc (Mathematics & Linguistics, 1975), MSc (Mathematics & Statistics, 1976), and PhD (Linguistics, 1981). Her areas of scholarly interest are historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, mathematical/statistical methods in linguistics, onomastica, Peircean semiotics, and women and language. She has published in all of these areas. Her areas of language specialization include English, German, Germanic, French, Romance, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric. Her current research is mostly on dialectometry (statistical methods applied to dialect study), with particular application to British, Finnish and Romanian dialects. In her capacity as Vice-President Academic, Dr. Embleton served as Chair of the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents (OCAV) from 2004-2008. She has been on OCAV's Executive since 2001, chairs OCAV's standing committee on international issues, and represents OCAV on several Council of Ontario Universities committees and task forces, as well as on the Board of the Ontario Universities Application Centre. In 2006-2007, she was Chair of NATVAC, the National Vice-Presidents Academic Council. This is her sixth year on the Fields Board.
Philip Siller, Vice-Chair, received his Ph.D. in mathematics (model theory) in 1973 from the University of Minnesota under the direction of Prof. Erwin Engeler, now at the ETH in Zurich. He later earned an LL.B. from the University of Toronto and practiced corporate and commercial law in Toronto. From 1982-92, he was an executive with Olympia & York Developments Limited, a diversified real-estate development company with interests in natural resources and other sectors. Since 1992, Mr. Siller has been the president of his own venture-management firm, Hexagram & Co.. From 2006-09, he served as co-CEO of Eastport Capital Corp., a unit of Goldman Sachs & Co. in New York. Currently, he is Co-CEO of BroadRiver Asset Management, L.P., an manager of non-correlated alternative fixed-income investments for institutional investors. At the University of Toronto, he has taught seminars at the Faculty of Law and the Department of Political Science and served on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies and the Steering Committee of the Harrowston Program in Conflict Management and Negotiation. Mr. Siller is married and has four children. This year will be his twenty-fourth on the Fields Board.
Ian Hambleton, Director, received his doctorate from Yale University in 1973, and was an L. E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago before joining McMaster University, where he has served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics for three terms, was active in university affairs as President of the McMaster Faculty Association, and was several times elected to the Senate and Board of Governors. He is a prominent mathematician with more than 75 published articles in leading international journals, whose research in geometry and topology connects to a broad range of mathematics. His distinguished record of scholarship has been recognized by a high level of NSERC funding for almost 40 years, supporting an extensive program of graduate and postdoctoral training. He was a Member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for two years, and a Visiting Professor for three years at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, in addition to numerous other visiting positions at major mathematical centres. This year is his third on the Fields Board.
Huaxiong Huang, Deputy Director, was trained as an applied mathematician. He received his PhD in Mathematics in 1992 from the University of British Columbia, obtaining his postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins and Simon Fraser Universities. While at the Fields Institute he remains a professor at York University, where he has been teaching in the Mathematics Department since 1999. His credentials and research interests make him a perfect fit for this role. He maintains an active professional life within the mathematics field, editing several journals related to his interests in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing, Financial and Industrial Mathematics, Biomathematics, and Fluid Mechanics. The coming year will be his second on the Fields Board.
Lisa Baiton oversees both the international and domestic public affairs programs at CPPIB. She has over 25 years experience in progressively senior executive leadership roles in both the public and private sectors. Prior to joining CPPIB, Lisa served as Vice President and Practice Lead, Government Relations for Environics Communications Inc., a North American full-service public affairs firm where she provided executive-level counsel to large corporate clients. She has also worked for one of Canada's largest industry associations, the Canadian Bankers Association, and for senior Cabinet Ministers and a Premier within three governments (Saskatchewan, Federal, and Ontario).
Originally from Saskatchewan, Lisa has a BA in Political Science (University of Saskatchewan), and a MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management (Northwestern University) and the Schulich School of Business (York University), with global electives completed at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. She is a graduate of the Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD) Directors Education Program at the Rotman School of Management (University of Toronto). She is an active member of the international business community. In addition to serving on The Fields Institute Board of Directors, she also serves on the Canada-China Business Council Board, the C.D. Howe Institute International Economic Policy Council, and the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada Toronto Advisory Group. This year will be her first on the Fields Board.
Laurent Bernardin is the Executive Vice-President of Research and Development as well as Chief Scientist at Maplesoft, responsible for the corporate technology vision as well as all product development.
A contributor to the Maple project for 14 years, Laurent has held increasingly senior positions at Maplesoft since joining the company full-time in 1999, successfully delivering over 40 product releases and leading the R&D team to achievements such as the breakthrough releases of Maple 15 as well as MapleSim. Under his tenure, the R&D department at Maplesoft has grown from 33 to over 60 people today.
Laurent is a recognized authority in the area of scientific computation and has published numerous papers on mathematical algorithms as well as parallel and distributed computation. Laurent is an active member of the research community, serving on the editorial board of the Journal for Symbolic Computing and is regularly asked to serve on program committee or act as referee for prominent conferences in the field, such as ISSAC (International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computing), ACA (Applications of Computer Algebra), IAMC (Internet Accessible Mathematical Computations) and CASC (Computer Algebra and Scientific Computing). Frequent speaking engagements and invited lectures allow Laurent to share his thoughts on Maple and mathematical computation systems with audiences at top research institutions and companies around the world. In 2004, Laurent accepted the NSERC Synergy Award on behalf of Maplesoft, recognizing our long-term partnership with the University of Waterloo. Laurent also serves on the W3C Math Working Group as well as on the Numeric Math Consortium, defining industry standards such as the MathML markup language for mathematical expressions.
Prior to joining Maplesoft, Laurent held research and IT positions at ETH Zurich, ran a software consulting business and co-founded an e-commerce startup company.
Laurent holds a PhD (Dr. sc. tech.) in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, focusing on algorithms for Symbolic Computation as well as an engineering degree (Dipl. Ing. ETH), also from ETH Zurich. This year will be his first on the Fields Board.
Eoghan Burns is the Chief Actuary and CRO for Canada Life Reinsurance. Prior to moving to taking up this role he was Director of Finance and Risk Operations for Irish Life Corporate Business. Eoghan has worked in Irish Life for 20 years with the majority of that time working in the Corporate Business division which provides Defined Contribution pensions and Group Risk benefits for employees of companies and the public sector. He has 15 years’ experience as the Actuary for Corporate Business as well as being the Finance Director of the division for the past 10 years. More recently, he has also had responsibility for Defined Contribution Operations before taking over Group Risk Administration operations. In addition, Eoghan has been a Council member of the Irish Association of Pension Funds for the last six years and has served as the Chair of the Benefits Committee for the past four years. This year will be his third on the Fields Board.
Tom Duever is a highly respected senior academic administrator and accomplished researcher who joins Ryerson University from the University of Waterloo. During his nine-year tenure as chair of Waterloo’s Department of Chemical Engineering, Dr. Duever led the department toward unprecedented growth and championed initiatives which contributed to the international reputation of both the department and faculty. He was instrumental in the creation of the multidisciplinary nanotechnology undergraduate program, and also negotiated the establishment of Waterloo’s Dubai campus in the United Arab Emirates and its associated chemical engineering program. Dr. Duever also oversaw the creation and realization of ‘E6’ – Waterloo’s dedicated, 5,400-square-metre state-of-the art chemical engineering research building – and the move of faculty members into Waterloo’s renowned Quantum Nano Centre. As an internationally recognized researcher, Dr. Duever has more than 70 articles in journals and conference proceedings to his credit. He is a prolific presenter who has shared his research findings and his insights on chemical engineering at more than 80 conferences, lectures and seminars worldwide. He has also supervised the research projects of more than 30 graduate students. Dr. Duever is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario, and a fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada. He previously served as chair of the Association of Canadian Chairs of Chemical Engineering. He holds PhD, master’s and bachelor degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Waterloo.This year will be his second on the Fields Board.
Cindy Forbes Cindy Forbes is Executive Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer of Manulife and is a member of the Company’s Global Leadership Team. Prior to this role, she served as Chief Actuary.
Ms. Forbes oversees the Company’s analytics function worldwide. She has spent more than 30 years with Manulife holding senior finance roles in the U.S., Investment, Reinsurance, Asia and Group Divisions. She spent seven years working in Asia, first as CFO for Manulife Japan followed by five years in HK as CFO for the entire Asia region. Manulife offers a wide range of life insurance, wealth management, pension and group benefit products across 12 countries in Asia.
Ms. Forbes was named one of Canada’s Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network in 2011 and again in 2015. She is the Chair of the University of Waterloo Board of Governors and a member of the International Insurance Society Board of Directors.
Her industry knowledge and international experience, combined with the diverse roles she has held in her career, give her a unique perspective on the future state of the analytics function and the insurance industry. This year will be her first on the Fields Board.
Ian Goulden is a professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, within the Faculty of Mathematics. In 2010 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for his research contributions in algebraic combinatorics. In 2009, he received the Faculty of Mathematics Award for Distinction in Teaching. This year is his third on the Fields Board.
Arvind Gupta is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. He has served as President and Vice-Chancellor of UBC, and as the CEO and Scientific Director of Mitacs Inc. Arvind has published extensively on computational genomics and national innovation and industrial strategies. Arvind is well-known as a Social Entrepreneur with a solid track record for initiatives to improve Canadian productivity and competitiveness by successfully enhancing workforce skills through industry and academic partnerships. As CEO of Mitacs Inc., Arvind achieved international success for interweaving graduate education with business and socio-economic needs by bringing together 60 universities with more than 1,000 industrial partners. Under his leadership, Mitacs collaborated with the federal government, all ten provincial governments, and numerous foreign governments including China, India, Brazil and Mexico. This led Mitacs to become the largest organization of its type in the world with 25 offices across Canada and annual revenue growth exceeding more than 25% each year for 15 years (CAD 3 million in 2000 and approximately CAD 100 million today). Within his role as President and Vice Chancellor, Arvind developed UBC’s long-term strategic framework designed to further boost the global recognition of the University in a changing societal context.
Significant achievements include serving as an Innovation leader for resetting the Federal Innovation Agenda, serving on the Federal Government’s blue-ribbon innovation panel (Jenkins panel) which was highly influential in formulating the country’s current national innovation strategy. Further, the Premier of BC selected Arvind to develop and recommend a provincial innovation strategy which was substantially implemented. Arvind was instrumental in creating the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) and the Banff International Research Station in Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS). He serves as a regular contributor on research, innovation, and advanced skills policies, with more than 100 national and international appearances. Arvind is a Senior Fellow of the Asia–Pacific Institute, and a Member of the Government of Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC). He serves on the Boards of the India-Canada Research Centre of Excellence (IC-IMPACTS), BIRS, the Fields Institute, and the Canadian Statistical Society Institute. Arvind has previously served on the campaign cabinet for United Way and on the Boards for Great Northern Way Trust, Canadian Mining Innovation Council, Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, PIMS, Mitacs, and the Grand-NCE (International Scientific Advisory Council). Arvind obtained his BSc from McMaster University, and his MSc and PhD from the University of Toronto. He resides in Vancouver and is married to Dr. Michelle Pereira. He has three daughters.This year is his second on the Fields Board.
Ted Hsu was trained in theoretical physics at Princeton University working on high-temperature superconductivity. After holding post-docs at UBC in Vancouver, the CNRS in France and AECL Chalk River, he switched over to finance, working in interest rate modelling and eventually managing equities program trading and trading automation for the Tokyo desk of Morgan Stanley. More recently Ted was the executive director of SWITCH, a sustainable energy association in south-eastern Ontario. From 2011-2015 he served as the Member of Parliament for Kingston and the Islands and as the Liberal Party of Canada’s critic for science and technology and post-secondary education. He lives in his hometown of Kingston with his wife Tara and two young daughters. The coming year will be his second on the Fields Board.
William Janeway a Senior Advisor and Managing Director of Warburg Pincus. He joined Warburg Pincus in 1988 and was responsible for building the information technology investment practice. Previously, he was executive vice president and director at Eberstadt Fleming. Dr. Janeway is a director of Magnet Systems, Nuance Communications, and O'Reilly Media. He is an Affiliated member of the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge University. Dr. Janeway is a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council and of the Field Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences and the board of governors of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Bendheim Center for Finance. He is a member of the management committee of the Cambridge-INET Institute, University of Cambridge and a Member of the Board of Managers of the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance (CERF). He is the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets Speculation and the State, published by Cambridge University Press in November 2012. Dr. Janeway received his doctorate in economics from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar. He was valedictorian of the class of 1965 at Princeton University.The coming year will be his second on the Fields Board.
Niky Kamran is a James McGill Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University. His research interests are in differential geometry and mathematical physics. He is a recipient of the Aisensadt Prize, of the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize, and of a Killam Fellowship. He is also a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Fields Institute. The coming year will be his second on the Fields Board.
Kim McAuley is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Queen's University where she serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. Kim earned her B.A.Sc. from the University of Waterloo and her Ph.D. from McMaster University. With her graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, she develops mathematical models for a wide range of chemical production biochemical processes. These models are used to predict product quality, production rates and the effectiveness of operating and control systems. Her group has developed novel statistical methods for determining appropriate values for kinetic, thermodynamic and mass-transfer parameters that appear in model equations. These methods are used for selecting and tuning model parameters so that model predictions match the behaviour of industrial processes. Kim McAuley has developed models for leading international companies including Abbott Point of Care, DSM, DuPont, Exxon, INEOS, NOVA Chemicals, Praxair and Shell. She was Associate Editor for Chemical Engineering Journal and serves on the International Advisory Boards for Macromolecular Theory & Simulations and Macromolecular Reaction Engineering. Dr. McAuley received a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her modeling research.This coming year will be her third on the Fields Board.
Siobhan Roberts is a Toronto-based journalist and author whose work focuses on mathematics and science. While writing her latest book, Genius at Play, she was a Director's Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Her first book, King of Infinite Space, won the Mathematical Association of America's Euler Prize for expanding the public's view of mathematics. Roberts' documentary about Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry, aired on TVOntario's "The View From Here," and her short film about Princeton mathematician John Horton Conway, Conway's Memento Mori, ran on the "Numberphile" YouTube channel. She contributes to various publications, including The Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Nautilus, Quanta, the New Yorker, the Guardian and the Mathematical Intelligencer, and has won four National Magazine Awards. Currently, she is in the process of establishing a math museum.This coming year will be her second on the Fields Board.
Dan Rosen is the CEO of D1g1t Inc. He was the co-founder and CEO of R2 Financial Technologies, and an adjunct professor of Mathematical Finance at the University of Toronto. Dr. Rosen acts as an advisor to institutions around the world and lectures extensively on valuation of derivatives and structured finance, counterparty credit risk, risk portfolio management, economic and regulatory capital. He has authored numerous risk management and financial engineering publication, and serves in the editorial board of several industrial and academic journals. Dr. Rosen was inducted in 2010 a fellow of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, for his "outstanding contributions to the Fields Institute, its programs, and to the Canadian mathematical community". Prior to founding R2, Dr. Rosen had a successful ten-year career at Algorithmics. He holds an M.A.Sc. and Ph.D.in Chemical Engineering from the University of Toronto. The coming year will be his fourth on the Fields Board.
Pekka Sinervo is an experimental particle physicist and a Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto. He had a leading role in the discovery of the top quark in 1995 and has subsequently measured many of its properties. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, which co-discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, and continues to search for new phenomena at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. In addition to his teaching and research career, he has taken leadership roles in numerous organizations over the last several decades. Most recently, he was senior vice-president, research at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Prior to that he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science and Vice-Provost, First-Entry Programs at the University of Toronto. He has also served as Chair of the Department of Physics, and Vice-Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. He has served on numerous national and international advisory panels, and was most recently chair of the Board of Directors at SNOLAB, an international underground laboratory located in Sudbury, Canada. His contributions have been recognized by the Outstanding Teaching Award in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto (1995), the Rutherford Medal for Physics awarded by the Royal Society of Canada (1996), Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (1999), Fellowship in the American Physical Society (2003), appointment as Senior Fellow of Massey College (2004), named a Patron of the Canadian Astronomical Society (2008), the Acenberg Award from the Rotman Research Institute (2008) and Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012). The coming year will be his second on the Fields Board.
Ravi Vakil is a Professor of Mathematics and the Robert K. Packard University Fellow at Stanford. He is an algebraic geometer, whose work touches on topology, string theory, applied mathematics, combinatorics, number theory, and more. He was a four-time Putnam Fellow while an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught at Princeton and MIT before moving to Stanford in 2001.
He has received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, the American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship, the Terman fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER grant, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He has also received the Coxeter-James Prize from the Canadian Mathematical Society, and theAndré-Aisenstadt Prize. He was the 2009 Hedrick Lecturer at MathFest, and is the MAA Pólya Lecturer.
He helped found the website Mathoverflow, and serves on the Board of Directors. He works extensively with talented younger mathematicians at all levels, from middle school through recent Ph.D.'s, and is a founding Trustee of Proof School (in San Francisco). The coming year will be his first on the Fields Board.
Michael Zerbs is an Executive Vice President and Co-Head of Information Technology, Enterprise Technology at Scotiabank. He has shared responsibility for the advancement of Scotiabank’s technology strategy and for the oversight of the broader Information Technology function in support of the Bank’s business strategy. His mandate is to advance Scotiabank’s capability to develop, operate and protect the infrastructure, systems and applications that support all businesses and corporate functions globally. Prior to joining Scotiabank in 2014 as Senior Vice President & Head, Risk Management Information Technology, Michael held senior positions in IT, including President and Chief Operating Officer at Algorithmics and Vice President, Risk Analytics at IBM. Michael holds a Master of Science in Social and Economic Sciences in Commerce, a Master of Business Administration in Finance and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Economics. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. Michael is married and has three children. The coming year will be his second on the Fields Board.
