Scientific Advisory Panel
The Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) works in conjunction with the Directorate to provide scientific leadership to the Institute and to support the advancement of the Institute's scientific endeavours. 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 conferences, summer schools, and special lecture series.
Members 2020-21
| Michael Harris | Columbia University |
| Deirdre Haskell | Fields Institute |
| Richard Kenyon | Yale University |
| Mark Lewis | University of Alberta |
| V. Kumar Murty | The Fields Institute |
| George C. Papanicolaou | Stanford University |
| Sujatha Ramdorai | University of British Columbia |
| Sylvia Serfaty | New York University |
| Gigliola Staffilani | MIT |
| Tao Tang | SUSTC |
| Vahid Tarokh | Duke University |
| Ulrike Tillmann | University of Oxford |
Michael Harris is Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University and is on extended leave from the Université Paris-Diderot, where he taught for 20 years; before that he was a Professor at Brandeis University. He obtained his PhD in 1977 from Harvard University, under the direction of Barry Mazur. He has organized or co-organized more than 20 conferences, workshops, and special programs in his field of number theory, and until 2018 directed the European Research Council project “Arithmetic of Automorphic Motives” at the Institut des Hautes-Études Scientifiques outside Paris. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Bethlehem University in Palestine and a National Academy of Sciences Exchange Scholar at the Steklov Institute in Moscow. His book Mathematics without Apologies won the 2016 PROSE award in Mathematics from the Association of American Publishers. He is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his contributions to the Langlands program he obtained the Grand Prix Sophie Germain de l’Académie des Sciences in 2006; in 2007 he shared the Clay Research Award with Richard Taylor.
Deirdre Haskell, Deputy Director, 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.
Richard Kenyon is Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. He received his BA in 1986 from Rice University and PhD from Princeton in 1990 under the supervision of William Thurston. He has held positions in CNRS at Grenoble, Lyon, and Orsay, and as full professor at UBC, Brown and Yale.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a recipient of the Simons Investigator award, the Loeve prize and the Rollo Davidson prize.
His research interests are in statistical mechanics, probability, combinatorics and geometry.
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.
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.
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.
Sujatha Ramdorai holds a Canada Research Chair position at the Mathematics Department, University of British Columbia. She has served as a Member of several national and international committees on education, research and international cooperation. She is a winner of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award (2004), International Centre for Theoretical Physics Ramanujan Prize (2006), Canadian Mathematical Society Krieger-Nelson Prize (2018). As a Board Member of India-Canada Centre for Innovative Multidisciplinary Partnerships to Accelerate Community Transformation and Sustainability, she has contributed to deepening ties between India and Canada in the areas of education and research.
Sylvia Serfaty is Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Prior to this she has been Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (currently Sorbonne Université) at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions, and has held various appointments at the Courant Institute of NYU. She earned her BS and MS in Mathematics from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1995, and her PhD from Université Paris Sud in 1999.
She works in calculus of variations, nonlinear partial differential equations, and mathematical physics. A large part of her work has focused on analyzing vortices in the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity and on the statistical mechanics of systems of points with Coulomb-type repulsion.
She was the recipient of the European Mathematical Society prize in 2004, the Henri Poincaré prize in 2012 and the Mergier-Bourdeix Prize of the Académie des Sciences de Paris in 2013, and was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. She was also named a Simons investigator in 2018 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Photo credit: Stefan Falke
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 was 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.
Ulrike Tillmann has worked broadly in topology, K-theory, and non-commutative geometry. Her work on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and manifolds of higher dimensions has been inspired by problems in quantum physics and string theory, while new challenges in data science have motivated some of her recent work.
After finishing school in Germany, Tillmann went to Brandeis University as a Wien International Scholar and studied for her PhD under Ralph Cohen at Stanford University. She then worked with Graeme Segal at Cambridge University before she took a position in Oxford where she has been a professor since 2000.
Tillmann was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 2004 and the Bessel-Humboldt Forschungs Preis in 2008. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2008, an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012, and a member of the Leopoldina in 2017. She is a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute since its establishment, and serves on scientific boards of several international institutions, including the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics and the Austrian Science Foundation. Currently, she is a member of Council of the Royal Society where she also served as (interim) Vice President in 2018.
