Scientific Advisory Panel
The Directorate and the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) provide the scientific leadership of the Institute. The SAP, which is chaired by the Director, includes the Deputy Director and a rotating membership of at least seven distinguished mathematicians from Canada and abroad. The Panel meets twice a year (Spring and Fall) and makes recommendations to the Board of Directors on the selection of thematic and focus programs, workshops and conference, summer schools, and special lecture series.
Members 2018- 19
| Luis Caffarelli | University of Texas, Austin |
| Ronald Coifman | Yale University |
| Ian Hambleton | Fields Institute |
| Brendan Hassett | Brown University |
| Huaxiong Huang | Fields Institute |
| Mark Lewis | University of Alberta |
| Russell Lyons | Indiana University |
| Robert McCann | University of Toronto |
| Dusa McDuff | Barnard College |
| George C. Papanicolaou | Stanford University |
| Gigliola Staffilani | MIT |
| Tao Tang | SUSTC |
| Vahid Tarokh | Duke University |
Luis Caffarelli, was born and grew up in Buenos Aires. He obtained his Masters of Science (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) at the University of Buenos Aires. His Ph.D. advisor was Calixto Calderón. He currently holds the Sid Richardson Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He also has been a professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. From 1986 to 1996 he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
In 1991 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris; Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and Universidad de La Plata, Argentina. He received the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1984. Caffarelli is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
In 2003 Konex Foundation from Argentina granted him the Diamond Konex Award, one of the most prestigious awards in Argentina, as the most important Scientist of his country in the last decade. In 2005, he received the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences "for his important contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations". He also received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics in 2009. In 2012 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (jointly with Michael Aschbacher) and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Ronald Coifman’s research interests include: nonlinear Fourier analysis, wavelet theory, singular integrals, numerical analysis and scattering theory, real and complex analysis; new mathematical tools for efficient computation and transcriptions of physical data, with applications to numerical analysis, feature extraction recognition and denoising. He is currently developing analysis tools for spectrometric diagnostics and hyperspectral imaging.
Coifman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the 1996 DARPA Sustained Excellence Award, the 1996 Connecticut Science Medal, the 1999 Pioneer Award of the International Society for Industrial and Applied Science, and the 1999 National Medal of Science.
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.
Brendan Hassett is Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics at Brown University.
He received his BA in 1992 from Yale and his PhD from Harvard in 1996 under the supervision of Joseph Harris. From 1996 to 2000 he worked as a Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago; for part of this time he was supported by a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. He was a faculty member at Rice University from 2000 to 2015 and chaired its mathematics department from 2009 to 2014. He has held visiting positions at the Mittag Leffler Institute in Stockholm, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Paris (Orsay).
Brendanʼs research focus is algebraic geometry. He enjoys geometric questions inspired from number theory, problems natural from an arithmetic perspective but with surprising geometric implications. He also likes classification problems involving a wide range of techniques, from the classical theory of algebraic curves through Hodge theory and birational geometry.
Brendan has written more than 50 research papers and has authored or co-edited six books. His work has been recognized with a Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and the Charles W. Duncan Award for Outstanding Faculty at Rice. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Brendan has co-organized more than 20 conferences and workshops, including the 2006 Clay Summer School in Arithmetic Geometry, the Spring 2009 program in Algebraic Geometry at MSRI, and the 2015 AMS Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry.
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.
Dusa McDuff is the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College. At Barnard, she currently teaches "Calculus I", "Perspectives in Mathematics" and courses in geometry and topology.
Professor McDuff gained her early teaching experience at the University of York (U.K.), the University of Warwick (U.K.) and MIT. In 1978, she joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at SUNY Stony Brook, where she was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor in 1998.
Professor McDuff has honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, the University of York and the University of Strasbourg. She is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and an honorary fellow of Girton College, Cambridge.
She has received the Satter Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Outstanding Woman Scientist Award from AWIS (Association for Women in Science).
Professor McDuff's service to the mathematical community has been extensive. She is particularly interested in issues connected with the position of women in mathematics, and currently serves on the MSRI Board of Trustees. Together with Dietmar Salamon, she has written several foundational books on symplectic topology as well as many research articles.
Mark Lewis is Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Biology and Professor of Mathematics/Statistics and Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. With a research focus in spatial ecology, he has supervised over 50 graduate students and postdocs and has published six books and more than 200 papers. Research prizes include the CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize for Exceptional Research in Mathematics and the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Research Prize. He is a Chief Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Biology, and is former President of the Society for Mathematical Biology. Lewis has experience in helping lead strategic networks, including the NSERC Canadian Aquatic Invasive Species Network (CAISN) and the NSERC Turning Risk into Action for the Mountain Pine Beetle Network (TRIA). He is a Fellow of the Fields Institute, the Society for Mathematical Biology, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Royal Society of Canada.
Russell Lyons obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1983. After a postdoc in Paris and a job at Stanford University, Lyons moved to Indiana University in 1990, where he is James H. Rudy Professor of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Statistics. His primary area of research is discrete probability and its connections to other areas of mathematics, including ergodic theory, geometric group theory, and combinatorics. He is also very interested in the teaching of statistics and has done some research in statistics. Lyons was a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a Visiting Miller Research Professor, an Institute of Mathematical Statistics Medallion Lecturer, an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and gave an Hour Address at the Joint Mathematics Meetings. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Robert McCann (BScH '89 Queen's; PhD '94 Princeton) has played a leading role in the development of the theory and applications of optimal transportation. His 1994 thesis with Elliott Lieb introduced the concept of displacement convexity. Motivated by physical applications to interacting gases and equilibrium crystals, with collaborators he later extended such inequalities to curved settings, where they were shown to have a fundamental geometric significance, characterizing Ricci curvature bounds. He continues to explore the theory of optimal maps, and applications ranging from computer vision and weather prediction to nonlinear dynamics and economics. After holding an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship and Tamarkin Assistant Professorship at Brown University, in 1998 he accepted a position with tenure at the University of Toronto, where he remains. He has been lucky enough to hold visiting positions at IHES, MSRI, UC Berkeley, U Chicago, Courant Institute, MPI Leipzig, various universities in France and in Paris, among other institutions. He served as lead organizer for semesters of emphasis on Optimal Transportation at MSRI (2013), and on Variational Problems in Physics, Geometry and Economics at the Fields Institute (2014). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Mathematical Society, and the Fields Institute, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Advances in the Calculus of Variations, the Journal of Differential Equations, SIAM Journal of Mathematical Analysis, and as Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics (since 2007). Currently holding a Simons Fellowship (2016), he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul (2014).
George C Papanicolaou is currently the Robert Grimmett Professor in Mathematics at Stanford University. Besides his former focus on the analysis of waves and diffusion in inhomogeneous or random media, his recent research interests also include financial mathematics, especially the use of asymptotics for stochastic equations in analyzing complex models of financial markets and in data analysis. In 1987, the University of Athens conferred an Honorary Doctor of Science on Papanicolaou. In 2000, he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Papanicolaou was invited plenary speaker at multiple international congresses, among others at the SIAM 50th anniversary meeting in 2002 and at the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2003. In 2006, he received the SIAM von Neumann Prize in recognition of his wide-ranging work on analytic and stochastic methods and their application to the modeling of phenomena in the physical, geophysical, and financial sciences. In 2010 he received the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics. In 2011 he was the Gibbs lecturer of the American Mathematical Society. The University of Paris Diderot conferred on him the degree Doctor Honoris Causa in 2011.
Gigliola Staffilani has been the MIT Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Mathematics since 2007. She received the B.S. equivalent from the University of Bologna in 1989, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1991 and 1995. Following a Szego Assistant Professorship at Stanford, she had faculty appointments at Stanford, Princeton and Brown, before joining the MIT mathematics faculty in 2002 as tenured associate professor (professor in 2006). At Stanford, Professor Staffilani received the Harold M. Bacon Memorial Teaching Award in 1997, and was given the Frederick E. Terman Award for young faculty in 1998. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1995-96 and again in 2003-04. She was a Sloan Fellow from 2000-02 and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2009-10. In 2013 she became an AMS Fellow and a member of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences. In 2014 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and she will be a Simon Fellow in 2017-18.
Professor Staffilani is an analyst, with a concentration on dispersive nonlinear PDE. With her work she has contributed to the enormous progress that has been made in the last two decades in settling fundamental questions on existence of solutions for dispersive equations, as well as their long time behavior, singularity formation and interactions. This body of work has focused primarily on deterministic aspects of wave phenomena and it has been studied with sophisticated tools from harmonic analysis, nonlinear Fourier analysis, analytic number theory and geometry. More recently, though, a growing interest has been shown by the mathematical community in incorporating a nondeterministic point of view in the field of dispersive PDE and Staffilani's recent work has focused in advancing the field in this direction. Finally Staffilani is also interested on the study of the "process" used by mathematical physicists to pass from a complex system of particles interacting among each other to a macroscopic wave function that is able to describe the most important features of the system as a whole. More precisely, she studies the effective evolution equations arising as an appropriate limit of many body quantum dynamics.
Tao Tang graduated with a B. SC. in Mathematics from Peking University in 1984, and obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leeds in 1989. He was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science in 2017. He is currently the Vice-President, Dean of the Graduate School, and Chair Professor of Mathematics at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech).
Professor Tang's main research interest is computational mathematics. He has made important and original contributions to the field of scientific computing, including the development of adaptive grid methods and the spectral method, and the establishment of the convergence theory for numerical methods for hyperbolic conservation laws. Professor Tang was awarded the Leslie Fox Prize for numerical analysis in 1988 and the Feng Kang Prize for scientific computing in 2003. He has also won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award in 2016.
He taught as a faculty member at Simon Fraser University from 1990 to 1998. In 1998 he joined the Hong Kong Baptist University and served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics, Dean of the Graduate School and Associate Vice-President. He also served two terms as president of the Hong Kong Mathematical Society. He joined SUSTech in 2015 as its VP Research.
Professor Tang was elected a Fellow of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2012, and a Fellow of American Mathematical Society in 2017. Professor Tang has authored over 100 publications in top international journals.
Vahid Tarokh received an M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1992, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1995. Following half a year of postdoctoral fellowship at UIUC, he worked at AT&T Labs-Research until 2000, and as an Associate Professor at MIT until 2002. He joined Harvard University as a Hammond Vinton Hayes Senior Fellow of Electrical Engineering and Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics. He joined Duke University in January 2018.
Tarokh has received a number of awards including the Governor General of Canada Academic Gold Medal 1996, the IEEE Information Theory Society Prize Paper Award 1999, the Alan T. Waterman Award 2001 and was selected as one of the Top 100 Inventors of Years (1999–2002) by Technology Review magazine. In addition, the IEEE Communications Society has recognized him as the author of one of the most important papers published in IEEE Transactions in the last 50 years. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Applied Mathematics for his contributions to the theory of pseudo-random matrices. He holds four honorary degrees.
Tarokh’s current research interests are in representation, modeling, inference and prediction from data, and the design of organic machines.
