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 2019-20
| Chair, Arvind Gupta | University of Toronto |
| Vice Chair, Philip Siller | BroadRiver Asset Management. L.P. and Hexagram |
| Director, V. Kumar Murty | Fields Institute |
| Interim Deputy Director, Tom Salisbury | Fields Institute |
| Lisa Baiton | CPPIB |
| Laurent Bernardin | Maplesoft |
| Sarah Bevan | UBS Bank (Canada) |
| Octav Cornea | Université de Montréal |
| Matt Davison | Western University |
| Cindy Forbes | Manulife |
| Thierry Giordano | University of Ottawa |
| Ian Hambleton | McMaster University |
| Ted Hsu | Former MP, Science Advocate, Finance |
| Barbara Keyfitz | The Ohio State University |
| Kim McAuley | Queen's University |
| Siobhan Roberts | Journalist and Author |
| Ravi Vakil | Stanford University |
| Michael Zerbs | Scotiabank |
Arvind Gupta, Chair, is a Professor in the University of Toronto’s department of computer science. 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 is married to Dr. Michelle Pereira and has three daughters. 2019-20 is his fourth 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-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 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 impressive resumé outlines his mathematical accomplishments in diverse areas of analytic number theory, algebraic number theory, information security, and arithmetic algebraic geometry. He has served on the Canadian Mathematical Society Board of Directors, held vice-presidency at the Canadian Mathematical Society, and was elected Fields Institute Fellow in 2003. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and recipient of the Inventor of the Year Award at the University of Toronto and of the Coxeter-James Prize. His distinguished record is illustrated through his continued support for graduate and postdoctoral education initiatives. His dedication is also evidenced through his involvement in the NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Projects and through his outstanding contributions to the successful GANITA Computational Laboratory, in addition to numerous visiting positions and special lectures.
A prominent mathematician with more than 120 published articles in leading scholarly journals and extensive involvement with external committees, Professor Murty possesses broad expertise which will enhance the Institute’s position as an international hub for research and innovation. 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.
Tom Salisbury, Interim Deputy Director, has served terms as both Deputy Director from 2003 to 2006, and Associate Directory for Industry Liaison from 2016 to 2018. Currently a Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at York University, Professor Salisbury has nearly 40 years of academic experience. He is a leading figure in probability theory, specifically Brownian motion and related Markov processes, including their applications to mathematical finance and actuarial sciences.
Professor Salisbury received his BSc from McGill University in 1979, and his PhD in mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 1983. After a postdoctoral position as a Research Assistant Professor at Purdue University, he moved to York University where he is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Professor Salisbury has been co-editor-in-chief of the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, and has served on the editorial boards of Probability Theory and Related Fields, Fields Institute Communications & Monographs, Potential Analysis, and the Canadian Journal of Statistics.
He teaches a wide range of courses in the mathematical and financial engineering fields. He has also been involved in the finance and insurance sector as director of analytics at Quantitative Wealth Management Analytics group (QWeMA) prior to the latter's acquisition by CANNEX, and as a project leader on the Finsurance project at MITACS. His passion for mathematics education led to his involvement in curriculum development at a provincial level: in 2007, he chaired the task force that initiated the revision of the Ontario’s Grade 12 curriculum, and then served on the Ontario Minister of Education's curriculum council.
Professor Salisbury’s experience also includes a term as President of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2006 to 2008, and he was the recipient of the CMS’s Graham Wright Award for distinguished service in 2015.
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. 2019-20 will be her third year 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. 2019-20 will be his third year on the Fields Board.
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. 2019-20 will be her first year on the Fields Board.
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.
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 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.
Ian Hambleton 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. He served as the Director of the Fields Institute from 2015-2019. 2019-20 is his fifth year 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. 2019-20 will be his fourth year on the Fields Board.
Barbara Lee Keyfitz is the Dr. Charles Saltzer 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.
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. 2019-20 will be her sixth year 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. 2019-20 will be her fourth year 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). 2019-20 will be his third year 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. 2019-20 will be his fourth year on the Fields Board.
