Nassif Ghoussoub (Chair) (University of British Columbia) - Non-linear Analysis, Partial Differential Equations

Fred Adler (University of Utah) - Mathematical Biology

Jim Berger (Duke Univerisity) - Statistics

Robert Brandenberger (McGill University) - Theoretical Cosmology

Alex Brudnyi (University of Calgary) - Applied Mathematics

Jennifer Bryan (University of British Columbia) - Applied Statistics

Charmaine Dean (University of Western Ontario) - Statistics

Steve Evans (University of California, Berkeley) - Probability

Stephen E Fienberg (Carnegie Mellon University) - Statistics

Peter Glynn (Stanford University) - Discrete and stochastic systems in management science and engineering

Timothy Gowers (Cambridge University) - Combinatorics

Vivek Goyal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) - Sampling, Quantization, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and Optical Imaging

Andrew Granville (Universite de Montreal) - Number Theory

Sheila Hemami (Cornell University) - Electrical Engineering

Bill Johnson (Texas A&M University) - Geometric Functional Analysis

Valentine Kabanets (Simon Fraser University) - Computational Complexity

Yael Karshon (University of Toronto) - Symplectic Geometry

Elon Lindenstrauss (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) - Ergodic Theory

Sujatha Ramdorai (University of British Columbia) - Algebraic K-theory, Algebraic Number theory, Motives, Iwasawa theory

Zinovy Reichstein (University of British Columbia) - Algebra, Algebraic geometry and algebraic groups

Dominik Schoetzau (University of British Columbia) - Computational Mathematics, Scientific Computation

Jose Antonio Seade (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) - Singularity theory and complex geometry

Gordon Semenoff (University of British Columbia) - Particle & Nuclear Physics, Theoretical Physics

Nizar Touzi (Ecole Polytechnique ) - Financial Mathematics

Alberto Verjovsky (UNAM Mexico) - Dynamical systems, geometric topology, theory of real and complex foliations

Cédric Villani (l'Institut Henri Poincaré) - Partial Differential Equations

Michael Vogelius (Rutgers University)

Michael Ward (University of British Columbia) - Applied Partial Differential Equations and Asymptotic Analysis

Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard University) - Differential Geometry

Bio sketches

Nassif Ghoussoub (Chair) (University of British Columbia)

Nassif Ghoussoub obtained his Doctorat d'état in 1979 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France and is currently a Professor of Mathematics and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. His present research interests are in non-linear analysis, optimization and partial differential equations. He was the recipient of the Coxeter-James prize in 1990, of a Killam senior fellowship in 1992 and has been a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1993. In 2004, he was awarded a Doctorat Honoris Causa by the Université Paris-Dauphine. The Canadian Mathematical Society awarded him the Jeffrey Williams Prize in 2007, and the David Borwein Distinguished Career Award in 2010.

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Fred Adler (University of Utah)

Fred Adler received his BA in Mathematics from Harvard in 1984, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1991. After a post-doc at the University of California at Davis, Adler joined the faculty at the University of Utah as a joint appointment in Mathematics and Biology. He investigates many areas of mathematical biology, generally those starting with vowels, including ant biology, ecology, epidemiology, evolution, immunology, infectious diseases, oncology and urban ecology. He is the author of the textbook "Modeling the Dynamics of Life: Calculus and Probability for Life Scientists," now in its third edition with Brooks-Cole Publishing Company, and has co-authored a textbook on urban ecology, "Urban Ecosystems: Ecological Principles for the Built Environment," now in production with Cambridge University Press. Adler was awarded the Distinguished Mentor award by the University of Utah, and was recently elected president of the Society for Mathematical Biology.

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Jim Berger (Duke Univerisity)

Jim Berger received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1974. He was in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University until 1997, at which time he moved to the Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences (now the Department of Statistical Science) at Duke University as the Arts and Sciences Professor of Statistics, the position he currently holds. He was the founding director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, a National Science Foundation institute focused on interdisciplinary research involving statistics and mathematics, serving from 2002-2010. Berger was president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1995-1996, chair of the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association in 1995, and president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis during 2004. He has been involved with numerous editorial activities, including co-editorship of the Annals of Statistics during the period 1998-2000. He has served on numerous societal, organizational, academic, and governmental councils, committees, panels, and boards, including being chair of the Advisory Committee for the NSF Directorate on Mathematical and Physical Sciences since 2010. Berger is a Fellow of the ASA and the IMS and has received Guggenheim and Sloan Fellowships. He received the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies ‘President's Award’ in 1985, and the Sigma Xi Research Award at Purdue University for contribution of the year to science in 1993. He was the COPSS Fisher Lecturer in 2001 and the Wald Lecturer of the IMS in 2007. He was elected as a foreign member of the Spanish Real Academia de Ciencias in 2002, elected to the USA National Academy of Sciences in 2003, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Purdue University in 2004, and became an Honorary Professor at East China Normal University in 2011.

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Robert Brandenberger (McGill University)

Robert Brandenberger is currently Canada Research Chair and Professor of Physics at McGill University. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the ETH in Zurich and his PhD from Harvard University, spent time as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB and at DAMTP (Cambridge University). Before moving to McGill in 2004 he taught at Brown University. He is the winner of the 2011 CAP/CRM Prize in Mathematical Physics. From 2009 to 2011 he was a Killam Research Fellow. His main research interests are in the field of theoretical cosmology.

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Alex Brudnyi (University of Calgary)

Alex Brudnyi received his Ph.D. degree from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1995; he was the recipient of the NSERC postdoctoral fellowship and held the postdoctoral position at the University of Toronto (1996-1998). He was awarded the Andre Aisenstadt Mathematics Prize (2002), the Max Plank Institute for Mathematics Research Fellowship (2006) and the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (2010-2013). His research is mainly in the areas of Function Theory, Geometrical Analysis, Dynamical Systems and Commutative Banach Algebras. He has published more than 75 research papers and two books on Geometric Analysis.

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Jennifer Bryan (University of British Columbia)

Jennifer Bryan is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed in the department of Statistics and the Michael Smith Laboratories. She earned her B.A. from Yale in 1992, as a double major in Economics and German. A few years in the private sector, as an Associate in the Boston office of the Boston Consulting Group, convinced her to return to academia and she earned her Ph.D. in biostatistics from UC Berkeley in 2001. She then joined the faculty of UBC and won a Career Investigator Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Her main statistical interests are in applied statistics, statistical computing, and data analysis; her work is heavily motivated by problems arising in various genome-scale investigations, such as large-scale studies of genetic interaction.

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Charmaine Dean (University of Western Ontario)

Charmaine Dean is Professor and Dean of Science at Western University. Dr. Dean’s leadership at Western’s Faculty of Science has a focus on accelerating research within the faculty, enhancing and fortifying collaborations with other faculties, with industry, government agencies and the broader community, as well as supporting a superb training environment for students. She has a strong interest in the development of innovative learning environments to support the excellent students who are drawn to Western Science. This includes pursuits as diverse as the use of technological tools for collaborative learning experiences, interdisciplinary training, individualized learning mechanisms for high achievers as well as the development of learning opportunities for the mature students. Dr. Dean has a strong interest in building a sense of connectedness in Science to work toward a collective growth and enrichment of the Faculty. Dr. Dean received her B.Sc. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1980, and her M.Math and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Waterloo in 1984 and 1988. She was 2007 President of the Statistical Society of Canada, 2002 President of the International Biometrics Society, Western North American Region, has served as President of the Biostatistics Section of the Statistical Society of Canada, and has given ten 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 on the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Advisory Council and on selection panels for that foundation. She serves on the NIH Biostatistics Grant Review Panel; on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences; on the Board of Directors of the Banff International Research Station; and is a member of the College of Reviewers of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and of the MITACS College of Reviewers. She has served on several editorial boards and is currently Associate Editor of Biometrics, of Environmetrics, of Statistics in Biosciences and Senior Editor of Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology. In 2003, Dr. Dean was awarded the CRM-SSC prize; in 2007 she was named Fellow of the American Statistical Association; and in 2007 awarded the University of Waterloo Alumni Achievement Medal; in 2010 she was named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2012 received a Trinidad and Tobago High Commission Award. Dr. Dean’s 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 mortality rates, forest ecology, fire management, smoke exposure estimation from satellite imagery, and modeling of temporary and intermittent stream flow for flood analysis and predictions.

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Steve Evans (University of California, Berkeley)

Steve Evans received a BSc in Statistics with a University Medal from the University of Sydney in 1983 and a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1987. After a stint working for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a post-doc at the University of Virginia, Evans joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, where he now has positions in Statistics and Mathematics as well as in the Graduate Group in Computational and Genomic Biology and the Graduate Group in Computational Science and Engineering. He works in the general area of stochastic processes, with a particular emphasis on probability on algebraic and topological structures, and also conducts research into applications of probability to questions in biology, particularly in the areas of population genetics, phylogenetics, metagenomics, population dynamics, transcription regulation and the modeling of aging and mortality. Evans is a recipient of the Rollo Davidson Prize, a Presidential Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and the G. de B. Robinson Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society.

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Stephen E Fienberg (Carnegie Mellon University)

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Peter Glynn (Stanford University)

Peter W. Glynn is the current Chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1982. He then joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he held a joint appointment between the Industrial Engineering Department and Mathematics Research Center, and courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Mathematics. In 1987, he returned to Stanford, where he joined the Department of Operations Research. He is now the Thomas Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, and also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering. From 1999 to 2005, he served as Deputy Chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering, and was Director of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering from 2006 until 2010. He is a Fellow of INFORMS and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, has been co-winner of Best Publication Awards from the INFORMS Simulation Society in 1993 and 2008, was a co-winner of the Best (Biannual) Publication Award from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society in 2009, and was the co-winner of the John von Neumann Theory Prize from INFORMS in 2010. His research interests lie in simulation, computational probability, queueing theory, statistical inference for stochastic processes, and stochastic modeling.

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Timothy Gowers (Cambridge University)

William Timothy Gowers is a Royal Society Research Professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University, where he also holds the Rouse Ball chair, and is a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1998 he received the Fields Medal for his research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.

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Vivek Goyal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Vivek K Goyal received the B.S. degree in mathematics and the B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Iowa, where he received the John Briggs Memorial Award for the top undergraduate across all colleges. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Eliahu Jury Award for outstanding achievement in systems, communications, control, or signal processing. He is currently Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include source coding theory, sampling, quantization, magnetic resonance imaging, and optical imaging. He was awarded the 2002 IEEE Signal Processing Society Magazine Award and an NSF CAREER Award, and his students have been awarded several thesis and conference best paper awards. He served a six-year term on the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Image and Multiple Dimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee and was a plenary speaker at IEEE Data Compression Conference and IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop. He will give a tutorial on teaching signal processing at IEEE ICASSP 2012. He is a Technical Program Committee Co-chair of IEEE ICIP 2016 and a permanent Conference Co-chair of the SPIE Wavelets and Sparsity conference series.

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Andrew Granville (Universite de Montreal)

Andrew Granville is the Canadian Research Chair in Number Theory at the Université de Montréal, and an associate director of Centre de Recherche mathématiques. Dr Granville's primary research interest is in analytic number theory, although he has recently been interested in the exciting new field of additive combinatorics. He also dabbles in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry, combinatorics, harmonic and functional analysis, and theoretical computer science.He is the author of over 100 research articles, more than 20 expository articles, several books, a play and is currently working on a (mathematical) graphic novel. He works with a research team of about a dozen students and postdocs, and has helped develop the Montréal number theory seminar into one of the liveliest anywhere. Dr Granville has received several awards for research including the Jeffery-Williams prize, for expository writing including the Chauvenet prize, and for academic leadership including the (U.S.) Presidential Faculty Fellowship. Various honors include speaking at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians, and giving named lectureships in five different countries. Dr Granville has served on advisory boards for the CRM as well as for MSRI, the Fields' Institute, and the Cryptography Research Institute. He has been on the editorial boards of more than a dozen journals and several book series, and served on various external review panels.

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Sheila Hemami (Cornell University)

Sheila S. Hemami received her B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Michigan in 1990, and M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Reconstruction of Compressed Images and Video for Lossy Packet Networks" and she was one of the first researchers to work on what we now call "error concealment." She was with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California in 1994 and worked on video-on-demand. She joined the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University in 1995, where she holds the title of Professor and directs the Visual Communications Laboratory. Dr. Hemami's research interests broadly concern communication of visual information, both from a signal processing perspective (signal representation, source coding, and related issues) and from a psychophysical perspective. Dr. Hemami is an IEEE Fellow and has held various visiting positions, most recently at the University of Nantes, France and at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She has received numerous college and national teaching awards. She is an active volunteer in the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

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Bill Johnson (Texas A&M University)

Bill Johnson received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 1969. He is now Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, A.G. & M.E. Owen Chair of Mathematics, and Director of the Workshop in Analysis and Probability at Texas A&M University. He previously held regular appointments at the University of Houston (Assistant Professor, 1969-71) and Ohio State University (Assistant Professor, 1971-73; Associate Professor 1973-74; Professor, 1974-84). Johnson has given invited hour addresses to the American Mathematical Society and the Canadian Mathematical Society. He is the 2007 recipient of the Stefan Banach Medal, awarded by the Presidium of the Polish Academy of Sciences for "for outstanding achievements in mathematical sciences". He has served on the editorial boards of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, the Illinois Journal of Mathematics, Geometric and Functional Analysis, Mathematische Annalen, Positivity, the Houston Journal of Mathematics, and Extracta Mathematicae. From his base in geometrical functional analysis, Johnson has done research in probability, operator theory, complex analysis, approximation theory, and metric geometry. He is both amused and chagrined that his most frequently cited result is a lemma (Googling "Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma", with quotes, yields 45,000 hits).

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Valentine Kabanets (Simon Fraser University)

Valentine Kabanets received a PhD from the University of Toronto in 2001 under the supervision of Steve Cook. After spending one year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego, he joined the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, where he is currently an associate professor. His research interests are in computational complexity. He is a recipient of several best paper awards at top theoretical computer science conferences.

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Yael Karshon (University of Toronto)

Yael Karshon is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Tel-Aviv Univerity, and in 1993 she completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University. After holding a C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at M.I.T., she joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2002 she moved to Toronto with her family. She received the Yig'al Alon fellowship (1997-2000), the University of Toronto McLean award (2005), and the Canadian Mathematical Society Krieger-Nelson prize (2009). Her main research contributions are in symplectic geometry with emphasis on equivariant techniques. She enjoys working with Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows.

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Elon Lindenstrauss (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Elon Lindenstrauss is a Professor at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before going back to Jerusalem he had a Professor position at Princeton University. Lindenstrauss' main topic of research is homogeneous dynamics and its interconnections with number theory as well as spectral theory. For his work he has received several prizes, in particular the Fields Medal in 2010. His research interests are Ergodic theory, dynamical systems and number theory.

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Sujatha Ramdorai (University of British Columbia)

Sujatha Ramdorai had her early education in India and obtained her Ph.D in Tata Institute of Fundamental Research/Bombay University. She is a Fellow of all the three Science Academies in India and is a recepient of the Shansti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, and the ICTP Ramanujan Award. She served as a member of the National Knowledge Commission, Government of India between 2007-2009. She is a member of several international Scientific Research committees, like IFCPAR (Indo-French centre for Promotion of Advanced Research), CIMPA (International Centre for Pure and Applied Mathematics), ICTS (International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, India). She currently holds a CRC position at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

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Zinovy Reichstein (University of British Columbia)

Zinovy Reichstein received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1988, under the direction of Michael Artin. After holding postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, and MSRI, he has been on the faculty at Oregon State University (1993-2001) and the University of British Columbia (since 2001), He served as Associate Head of the UBC Mathematics Department in 2009-10. Reichstein received a Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching at Oregon State University in 1997 and was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad in 2010. Reichstein's Ph.D. work was in geometric invariant theory, an area of algebraic geometry concerned with the construction and study of moduli spaces. His interests have since expanded to a number of other fields within algebra, algebraic geometry, and the theory of algebraic groups; he also occasionally ventures into adjacent areas of algebraic combinatorics, computational algebra, number theory and algebraic topology. He has published 60 research papers and is best known for his work on numerical invariants of algebraic groups, such as essential and canonical dimension.

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Dominik Schoetzau (University of British Columbia)

Dominik Schötzau is currently a Canada Research Chair and Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. He received his MSc and PhD degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Minnesota. Before moving to UBC in 2003, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland. His research is primarily in the areas of Computational Mathematics and Scientific Computation, with applications in Fluid Mechanics and Electromagnetics.

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Jose Antonio Seade (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico)

Jose Seade was born in Mexico City in 1954. He got his BSc degree in Mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1976, and then his Master’s (1977) and Ph. D. degrees (1980) at the University of Oxford, U. K.. He has worked at the Institute of Mathematics of UNAM since 1980. His main research contributions are in singularity theory, real and complex foliations and complex geometry. He was President of the Mexican Mathematical Society during 1996-1997, and in 2005 he was awarded the Ferran Sunyer I Ballaguer Prize for his monograph “On the topology of isolated singularities in Analytic Spaces”. He was a Staff Associate at the International Centre of Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, during 2005-2011, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Latin American Union of Mathematicians (UMALCA) during 2001-2009. He is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the Pacific Rim Mathematical Association (PRIMA) and Scientific Coordinator of the Solomon Lefschetz International Laboratory (LAISLA), associated to the CNRS (France) and CONACYT (Mexico).

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Gordon Semenoff (University of British Columbia)

Gordon Semenoff is a theoretical physicist and is Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia. His research spans a wide range of theoretical subjects from condensed matter physics to string theory. He was awarded the CAP/CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics year 2000 and the Brockhouse Medal for Achievement in Condensed Matter Physics and Material Science in 2010. He was also awarded the Canadian Association of Physicists Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics in 2011. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada. Gordon received his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1981, was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the faculty of the University of British Columbia in 1983. He has held visiting professorships at numerous institutions worldwide including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the Henri Poincare Institute in Paris and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Bures-Sur-Yvette. Gordon has achieved international recognition for his 1984 pioneering work on the substance which later became known as graphene. His highly cited work which predated the discovery of graphene in the laboratory by 20 years was important for understanding that material and its remarkable electronic properties which have generated considerable excitement in fields spanning condensed matter physics, material science and electronics technology. Gordon is well known for contributions to quantum field theory, in particular for using mathematical index theorems to understand fractional charges and the discovery of the parity anomaly of odd-dimensional gauge theories. These ideas have had significant influence over the years and have recently come to the forefront in studies of topological insulators. His pioneering work on the real-time formulation of relativistic quantum field theories at non-zero temperature and density, including invention of the “Kobes-Semenoff rules”, are considered cornerstones of that subject. He has made important contributions to string theory. His computation of the Wilson loop in N = 4 Yang Mills theory is considered a classic and an important test of a duality between gauge fields and strings. His pioneering work in 2002 on string loop corrections to plane wave strings is considered seminal, not just for its results, but as the beginning of the integrability program of supersymmetric gauge theory and string theory which has been widely pursued over the ten years since.

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Nizar Touzi (Ecole Polytechnique )

- Professor Ecole Polytechnique - PhD, University Paris Dauphine 1994, Habilitation University Paris Dauphine 1999 - Vice President, Bachelier Society - Co-editor, Finance and Stochastics, Paris-Princeton Lectures on Mathematical Finance - Associate Editor, Mathematical Finance, Electronic Journal of Probability, SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics - Europlace Institute of Finance Best Young Researcher Award 2006 - University of Toronto Dean's Distinguished Visitor Chair 2010 - Invited Session Speaker ICM 2010

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Alberto Verjovsky (UNAM Mexico)

Alberto Verjovsky was born in Mexico City on January 2, 1943. He did his BSc in Mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1962 and wrote an honors thesis under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz. He obtained his PhD degree at Brown University in 1973 and was full professor at CINVESTAV (Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politecnico Nacional) from 1973 to 1986. From 1986 to 1993 he was coordinator of the Mathematics Section of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy. From 1993 to 2008 he was full professor at the Universite des Science et Technologies de Lille, France. From 2008 to the present day he is full professor at the Instituto de Matematicas de la UNAM in the city of Cuernavaca, Mexico.

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Cédric Villani (l'Institut Henri Poincaré)

Cedric Villani was born in 1973 in France. After studying mathematics at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris from 1992 to 1996, he was appointed assistant professor there. His 1998 PhD was mainly focused on the mathematical theory of the Boltzmann equation. Besides his advisor Pierre-Louis Lions (Paris-Dauphine), during his training he was much influenced by Yann Brenier, Eric Carlen and Michel Ledoux. In 2000 he became a full professor at l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and has stayed with that organization since then. He held semester-long visiting positions in Atlanta (1999), Berkeley (2004) and Princeton (2009), wrote about 50 research papers, and two reference books on optimal transport theory.

A mathematical analyst, Villani is particularly interested in fluid mechanics, statistical physics, probability, functional inequalities and Riemannian geometry.

His awards include the Jacques Herbrand Prize of the French Academy of Science (2007), the Prize of the European Mathematical Society (2008), the Henri Poincare Prize of the International Association for Mathematical Physics, the Fermat Prize (2009), and the Fields Medal (2010). His collaborators include Luigi Ambrosio, Dario Cordero-Erausquin, Laurent Desvillettes, Alessio Figalli, Wilfrid Gangbo, Gregoire Loeper, John Lott, Clement Mouhot, Ludovic Rifford, Giuseppe Toscani, and many others. He serves on the editorial boards of Inventiones Mathematicae, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Mathematical Physics and Journal of Statistical Physics.

In 2009 he was appointed director of the Institut Henri Poincare (IHP) in Paris, and part-time visitor of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES).

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Michael Vogelius (Rutgers University)

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Michael Ward (University of British Columbia)

Michael Ward has been a Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) since 1998. He received his Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from Caltech in 1988, after first receiving his B.Sc from UBC in 1983. Prior to returning to UBC in 1993 as an Assistant Professor, Ward was a Szego Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford from 1988-1991, and was a Postdoc at the Courant Institute from 1991-1993. His awards include the Andre-Aisendtadt Prize from the CRM in 1995, the Coxeter James Research Prize awarded by the CMS in 1997, the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship awarded by NSERC in 1998, and the CAIMS Research Prize awarded by the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society in 2011. In 1995 he gave an invited plenary lecture at the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Hamburg, Germany. He has been a Co-Editor-In-Chief of the European Journal of Applied Mathematics since 2001. He was the Director of the Institute for Applied Mathematics at UBC from 20003-2008. He has held various visiting positions, most notably at Oxford University as a Christiansen Research Fellow and at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His main research interests relate to the study of the dynamics and stability of interfaces and other localized structures that occur in reaction-diffusion systems, in models of micro-electrical mechanical systems, and in the study of diffusive transport in various cell-signalling problems in mathematical biology.

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Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard University)

Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, a Fields Medal recipient, serves as Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He also serves as Director of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Dr. Yau’s fields of interest include differential equations and mathematical physics. He remains active at the interface between geometry and theoretical physics.

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