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 2020-21
| Chair, Philip Siller | BroadRiver Asset Management. L.P. |
| Director, V. Kumar Murty | Fields Institute |
| Deputy Director, Deirdre Haskell | Fields Institute |
| Sarah Bevan | UBS Bank (Canada) |
| Robert J. Birgeneau | University of California, Berkeley |
| Lia Bronsard | McMaster University |
| Brenda Brouwer | Queen's University |
| Luis Caffarelli | University of Texas at Austin |
| Octav Cornea | Université de Montréal |
| Matt Davison | Western University |
| Charmaine Dean | Waterloo University |
| Vice-Chair, Cindy Forbes | Manulife |
| Thierry Giordano | University of Ottawa |
| Barbara Keyfitz | The Ohio State University |
| Siobhan Roberts | Journalist and Author |
| Yum-Tong Siu | Harvard University |
| Maksims Volkovs | TD Bank Group & Layer 6 AI |
| Carolyn Watters | Dalhousie University |
| Michael Zerbs | Scotiabank |
Philip Siller, 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 and c-founder of BroadRiver Asset Management, L.P., a 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 a member of the International Advisory board of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Faculty of Law, Hebrew University (Jerusalem). He is married and has four children. This year will be his twenty-sixth on the Fields Board.
V. Kumar Murty, Director, received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1982. From 1982 to 1987 he held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Concordia University, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. In 1987, he was appointed as Associate Professor at the Downtown campus of the University of Toronto, and in 1991 he was promoted to Full Professor. In 2001, he was deputed to the Mississauga campus to serve a two-year term as Associate Chair of Mathematics, and from 2004 to 2007 he served as the inaugural Chair of the newly-created Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the Mississauga campus. Twice he was Chair of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto Downtown campus.
With almost 40 years of experience in mathematical sciences at the local, national, and global level, Professor Murty’s mathematical accomplishments cover diverse areas including analytic number theory, algebraic number theory, information security, and arithmetic algebraic geometry. He has served on the Canadian Mathematical Society Board of Directors and held vice-presidency at the Canadian Mathematical Society. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1995, Fields Institute Fellow in 2003, and Senior Fellow of Massey College in 2020. He received the Coxeter-James Prize in 1991 and the University of Toronto’s Inventor of the Year Award in 2011.
Professor Murty has over 120 published articles in leading scholarly journals and extensive involvement with external committees. His influence in mathematics operates in tandem with his passion for philanthropic and entrepreneurial endeavours. His recent work on Smart Villages is dedicated to bringing the technological revolution to rural communities in an attempt to bridge the digital divide around the globe.
Deirdre Haskell was born in Philadelphia, PA, USA in 1963. She moved to England in 1974, where she went to school and university, completing her BA at Oxford University in 1984. She moved back across the Atlantic to pursue a PhD at Stanford University, awarded in 1990, and back once more for a postdoctoral fellowship at Queen Mary College of the University of London. A final transatlantic move took her to the College of the Holy Cross in her first tenure-track position. Another country then beckoned, and she moved to McMaster University in Canada in 2000, where she was promoted to full professor and served several terms as associate chair (undergraduate) of the Mathematics and Statistics department. Dr Haskell’s research in model-theoretic algebra has been supported by grants from the NSF and NSERC. During her career, she has organised many international conferences, including some at the Fields Institute. She has served on committees of the Association for Symbolic Logic, on the editorial board of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, and is currently a managing editor of Math Logic Quarterly. When not doing mathematics, she enjoys skiing, sailing, and hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.
Sarah Bevan, Managing Director, President and CEO of UBS Bank (Canada), a wholly owned subsidiary of UBS AG. With over 30 years of experience in the field of international wealth management, Ms. Bevan demonstrates a depth of expertise as a versatile and dynamic business leader. She brings to Canada decisive leadership and extensive management skills, with a proven ability to significantly increase revenues in an intensively competitive environment.
Prior to moving to Toronto five years ago, Ms. Bevan spent 15 years in New York, working for Barclays Bank plc which was then acquired by RBC. At RBC she headed the international wealth management division in New York until she joined UBS AG in 2007. Prior to New York, she worked 15 years in London, England where she started her financial markets career with Nesbitt Thomson Bongard Limited followed by Credit Suisse and Citibank NA, covering and traveling to Latin America and various corners of the world. Ms. Bevan was educated in England and holds a B.A. (Honours) in Modern Languages (French/Spanish) and History from CCAT in Cambridge. She sits on the Boards of UBS Bank (Canada), Mitacs, BIRS, and Advisory Board of start-up company Palette.
Robert J. Birgeneau became the ninth Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004 serving until 2013. An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community. During his service as Chancellor, Birgeneau strengthened UC Berkeley’s standing as one of the top universities in the world. Under his leadership, Berkeley became the first university in the United States to offer comprehensive financial aid to undocumented students and the first public university to provide significant financial aid to middle class students.
Before coming to Berkeley, Birgeneau served four years as President of the University of Toronto. He previously was Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he spent 25 years on the faculty. He is a fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society and other scholarly societies. He has received many awards for teaching and for his research on the fundamental properties of materials.
His awards include a special Founders Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the 2008 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award, and the Shinnyo-en Foundation’s 2009 Pathfinders to Peace Prize. In 2012 Birgeneau received the Compton Medal from the American Institute of Physics. In 2016 he received the Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Board. He also has received honorary doctorates from a number of universities.
A Toronto native, Birgeneau received his B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1963 and his PhD in physics from Yale University in 1966. He served on the faculty of Yale for one year, spent one year at Oxford University, and was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1968 to 1975. He joined the physics faculty at MIT in 1975 and was named Chair of the Physics Department in 1988 and Dean of Science in 1991. He became the 14th president of the University of Toronto on July 1, 2000.
At Berkeley, Birgeneau holds the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Distinguished Chair in the Departments of Physics, Materials Science and Engineering and Public Policy. He and his wife, Mary Catherine, have four grown children and twelve grandchildren.
Lia Bronsard is a Canadian mathematician and the former president of the Canadian Mathematical Society. She is a professor of mathematics at McMaster University. In her research, she has used geometric flows to model the interface dynamics of reaction–diffusion systems. Other topics in her research include pattern formation, grain boundaries, vortices in superfluids. Born in Quebec, she completed her undergraduate studies at the Université de Montréal, graduating in 1983, and earned her PhD in 1988 from New York University under the supervision of Robert V. Kohn. After short-term positions at Brown University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Carnegie Mellon University, she moved to McMaster in 1992, she was president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2014–2016. Bronsard was the 2010 winner of the Krieger–Nelson Prize. In 2018 the Canadian Mathematical Society listed her in their inaugural class of fellows.
Brenda Brouwer is Interim Dean of the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University. Dr. Brouwer completed a secondment with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI), where she joined the executive team as Head, Academic Partnerships. Prior to her secondment at the Vector Institute, Dr. Brouwer was the Vice-Provost and Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at Queen’s University for eight years, preceded by five years as the Associate Dean in the School of Graduate Studies. Dr. Brouwer also provided national leadership in graduate education as President of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies from 2015-2017.
Dr. Brouwer joined Queen’s after completing a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto. She holds a BSc in Kinesiology (University of Waterloo) and an MSc in Biomechanics (McGill University). She is a professor in the School of Rehabilitation Therapy with cross appointments to the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies and the Centre for Neuroscience. Dr. Brouwer maintains a successful research program that focuses on quantifying the biomechanical, neuromuscular, and metabolic demands of mobility in healthy aging and stroke, and she has supervised more than 47 graduate students and several post-doctoral fellows. She has published more than 90 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters from work funded through external research grants.
Dr. Brouwer has served on numerous Senate committees, Council of Ontario Universities’ committees, and working groups including the Council on Quality Assurance and the Highly Skilled Workforce Steering Committee. She has also been a member of the US Council of Graduate Studies Advisor group for completion in STEM master’s programs.
Luis A. Caffarelli earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires. He is professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, and holds the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents’ Chair in Mathematics (No. 1). He is a member of the ICES Applied Mathematics Group. His research interests include non-linear analysis, partial differential equations and their applications, calculus of variations, and optimization.
In a series of papers starting in 1990, Caffarelli studied viscosity solutions to non-linear partial differential equations, both the Monge–Ampère equation and the equation that models flow in a porous medium. This has proven to be an important means to arrive at the existence and uniqueness of solutions. As a result, Caffarelli has been cited as the world’s leading specialist in free-boundary problems for nonlinear partial differential equations, and a pioneer in methods tackling many classical problems that have long defied mathematicians.
With his collaborators, he has authored more than 250 scientific publications documenting this work. Caffarelli has received numerous honors and awards including three honorary doctorates, the Stampacchia Medal from the Italian Mathematical Union, the Bôcher Memorial Prize from the American Mathematical Society, the Pius XI Gold Medal from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Premio Konex, Platino y Brillantes from the Konex Foundation in Argentina, and the Rolf Schock Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences. He also received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics from the American Mathematical Society. In 2012 he received Israel’s Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
Octav Cornea obtained his PhD at the University of Rochester in 1993 and, in 1994, he became Professeur des Universités at the Université de Lille 1, France. He has been a Professor of Mathematics at the Université de Montréal since 2003. He served as director of the Institut des Sciences Mathématiques (2006-2009), director of the Séminaire de Mathématiques Supérieures (2010 – 2019) and deputy director of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (2011-2014). He works in geometry and topology, with contributions to algebraic topology, dynamical systems and, in the last fifteen years, mainly to symplectic topology. He was a Simons Fellow (2015-2016), a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2015-2016), a Research Professor at the Mathematical Science Research Institute in Berkeley (2009), and an Invited Speaker at the Inaugural Mathematical Congress of the Americas in 2013. 2019-20 will be his first year on the Fields Board.
Matt Davison has been appointed to a five-year term as the new Dean of Western University’s Faculty of Science, commencing July 1, 2018. He has been a faculty member at Western since July 1999 and has held several leadership roles in the Faculty of Science since 2014, including Acting Associate Dean and Chair of the Department of Statistical & Actuarial Sciences. Currently, he serves as the founding director of the School of Mathematical & Statistical Science, which combines the three departments of Applied Mathematics, Mathematics and Statistical & Actuarial Sciences.
Davison held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Quantitative Finance between 2006 and 2016 and is a Fields Institute Fellow. Prior to joining Western as a faculty member, Davison was Assistant Vice President, Equity Arbitrage, at Deutsche Bank Canada from 1997-1999 and he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Physiology Institute of the University of Bern (Switzerland) from 1995-1997.
He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Engineering) from the University of Toronto and an MSc and PhD in Applied Math from Western. With an expertise in risk management and financial mathematics, his research focuses on using these disciplines to better finance and operate renewable and other energy infrastructures. 2019-20 will be his second year on the Fields Board.
Charmaine Dean is Vice-President, Research & International and Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. Her research interest lies in the development of methodology for disease mapping, longitudinal studies, the design of clinical trials, and spatio-temporal analyses. Much of this work has been motivated by direct applications to important practical problems in biostatistics and ecology. Her current main research applications are in survival after coronary artery bypass surgery, mapping disease and studying mortality rates, including for Covid-19 research, forest ecology, fire management, smoke exposure estimation from satellite imagery, and modeling of temporary and intermittent stream flow for flood analysis and predictions.
Dr. Dean received her PhD degree from the University of Waterloo in 1988. She was 2007 President of the Statistical Society of Canada, 2002 President of the International Biometrics Society, Western North American Region, and has served as President of the Biostatistics Section of the Statistical Society of Canada. She has given eleven years of service to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, including two as Chair of the Statistical Sciences Grant Selection Committee and one as Chair of the Discovery Accelerator Supplement Committee for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences. She has served as Chair of the National Institutes of Health Biostatistics Grant Review Panel; on the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Advisory Council and on selection panels for that foundation; on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences; on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Banff International Research Station; and as a member of the College of Reviewers of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. She is a member of the Mitacs College of Reviewers and of College of Reviews of the Canada Research Chairs Program. She is Associate Editor of Biometrics, of Environmetrics, and of Statistics in Biosciences, and Senior Editor of Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology.
From 2011 to 2017, Charmaine Dean served as Dean of Science at Western University. In her role as Dean, she provided leadership and oversight for all faculty, staff, students and operations for the Faculty of Science as well as in University matters and key relationships outside the University. Prior to her service at Western, she played a major role in establishing the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in her capacity of Associate Dean of that Faculty. Previously, she was the founding Chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University.
Cindy Forbes, Vice-Chair, 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 second on the Fields Board.
Thierry Giordano is the Secretary and Vice-Dean, Governance and Full Professor at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Giordano's main research interests are in the interaction between operator algebras and dynamical systems. In particular, his interests include: Cantor minimal systems, ordered K-theory, groupoids and groupoid operator algebras, amenability and extreme amenability, random walks on groups and their boundaries. This is his first year on the Fields Board.
Barbara Lee Keyfitz is a Professor of Mathematics at the Ohio State University, which she joined in January 2009, after 21 years at the University of Houston and four and a half years as Director of the Fields Institute in Toronto, Canada. Barbara Keyfitz received her undergraduate education at the University of Toronto and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the Courant Institute, New York University. Her research area is Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations. She has contributed to the study of nonstrictly hyperbolic conservation laws. With Herbert Kranzer, she developed the concept of singular shocks, which have since been observed in some fluid systems. With Suncica Canic and others, she was a pioneer in the mathematical theory of self-similar solutions of multidimensional conservation laws. She has supervised five PhD students and ten postdoctoral visitors.
Keyfitz is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the Fields Institute, and the recipient of the 2012 SIAM Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession. She has served on the editorial boards of the AMS Proceedings, the AMS Transactions, JMAA, SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences, Fields Institute Monographs and Communications, Chinese Journal of Engineering Mathematics, and as a member of the Mathematical Reviews Editorial Committee.
In 2012 she was the Noether Lecturer at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, and the Kovalevsky Lecturer at the SIAM Annual Meeting. She received the 2005 Krieger-Nelson Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society, and an Honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree (2010) from the University of Waterloo. She was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2005-2006, and was a Vice-President of SIAM, 1998-2003, and of the American Mathematical Society from 2011-2014. She recently completed a four-year term (2011-2015) as President of the International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Siobhan Roberts is a Toronto-based journalist and author whose work focuses on mathematics and science. She writes primarily for the New York Times "Science Times," and over the years has contributed to The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The New Yorker, Quanta, and The Mathematical Intelligencer, among other publications. While writing her latest book, Genius at Play, The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway, 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 biography of Donald Coxeter, King of Infinite Space, won the Mathematical Association of America's Euler Prize for expanding the public's view of mathematics. Currently, while the Journalist in Residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, she is researching and writing a biography of the Swiss-American-Canadian group theorist and logician Verena Huber-Dyson.
Yum-Tong Siu is currently William Elwood Byerly Professor of Mathematics, Harvard University. He received his B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Hong Kong in 1963, his M.S. from the University of Minnesota in 1964, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1966. He started his academic career as an Assistant Professor at Purdue University (1966-1967), then University of Notre Dame (1967-1970), became Associate Professor at Yale University in 1970 and full Professor in 1972. He left Yale for Stanford University in 1978. After four years at Stanford, he joined the Harvard Mathematics Department in 1982. In 1992 he became the William Elwood Byerly Professor. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1971-1973) and Guggenheim Fellow (1986). From 1996 to 1999 he served as Chairman of the Department. Over the years, he has held Visiting Professor positions in many well-known institutions around the world.
Professor Siu has been a prominent figure in the field of several complex variables for several decades. He has mastered techniques at the interface among complex variables, differential geometry, and algebraic geometry. He gave invited addresses at three International Congresses of Mathematicians, two of which were plenary addresses (Helsinki, 1978; Warsaw, 1983; Beijing, 2002). For his significant contributions to Several Complex Variables, he was awarded the Stefan Bergman Prize by the American Mathematical Society in 1993. Other academic honours include: honorary doctorates awarded by University of Hong Kong, University of Bochum (Germany), and University of Macau; Corresponding Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences; Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Member of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences, and Member of Academia Sinica.
Maksims Volkovs is the Senior Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at TD Bank where he leads all research and development for Machine Learning at TD. Maks co-founded and was Head of Machine Learning at Layer 6 AI prior to its acquisition by TD, where his team built an industry-leading enterprise prediction platform with a focus on financial technology. Maks received his PhD from the University of Toronto where he was part of the Machine Learning Group led by Geoffrey Hinton. He previously worked at Microsoft Research and at Credit Suisse’s quantitative division. Maks has successfully competed in multiple international Machine Learning competitions organised by Google’s Kaggle and other platforms, achieving a status of Grandmaster (fewer than 200 in the world) with a global peak ranking of #47 out of over 130,000 data scientists. He has published over 25 papers in leading AI conferences and is co-inventor of 8 patents.
Carolyn Watters served as the National Research Council of Canada's (NRC) inaugural Chief Digital Research Officer, a position which includes oversight of the Digital Technologies Research Centre. Dr. Watters joined the NRC through the Interchange program, on secondment from Dalhousie University from Feburary 2019 through February 2020.
Dr. Watters, who has a PhD in Computer Science, served as the Provost and Vice President Academic for Dalhousie University, one of Canada’s oldest research universities, from 2010 to 2018. While Provost she served for a term as the Chair of the U15 Provost’s Academic Committee. Dr. Watters was one of the founding members of CALDO, a consortium of four and later nine Canadian research universities to build partnerships with universities in Latin America. She has engaged widely in quality assurance including a term as Chair of the Maritimes Higher Education Commission. Previously she was the Dean of Graduate studies including a term as the president of the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies. During that time she led international initiatives in partnership with the US Council of Graduate Schools.
She remains a Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University, specializing in human computer engagement in information spaces from documents to social media. Her interdisciplinary and collaborative work has spanned all three national research funding councils: the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She has published over 170 peer-reviewed articles, supervised many PhD and Masters students, and has engaged in applied research with corporations.
Dr. Watters engages, nationally and internationally, as a role model for women in science and technology, including giving service for many years on the founding board of Women Unlimited. She also has a deep appreciation for the importance of entrepreneurial experience and capacity building across disciplines and cofounded a successful spin-off company, now 20 years old, based on developing innovative interactive mathematics and working with publishers in the digital transformation of learning material.
Dr. Watters has been a member of a NSERC Discovery Grant committee, the NSERC Discovery Grant Process Review Panel, was the initial Chair of the NSERC Create Competition Committee, a member of the SSHRC Governing Council, and the Research Council for Mitacs.
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. 2019-20 will be his fourth year on the Fields Board.
