CRM Personnel

Octav Cornea obtained his PhD in 1993 from the University of Rochester and is a Professor at the Université de Montréal since January 2003. He works in topology and geometry. He was Research Professor at the MSRI (Berkeley) in the Fall of 2009 and a member of the IAS (Princeton) in 2015-2016 when he also held a Simons Fellowship from the Simons Foundation. He was an invited speaker at the Inaugural Mathematical Congress of the Americas in 2013. He serves as Director of the CRM since 2021.

Galia Dafni is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Concordia University. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 1993, and held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University, before coming to Montreal in 1998. Her research is in the area harmonic analysis and function spaces. She has extensive experience as a mentor of young mathematicians at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral level, and has served as both Undergraduate Program Director and Graduate Program Director of her department, as well as on the Women in Mathematics Committee, the Board of Directors, and the Publications Committee of the Canadian Mathematical Society. She served as Deputy Director of the CRM – Publications from 2013 to 2017 and Deputy Director in charge of Publications and Communication in 2022-2023.o

Benoit Durand-Jodoin has been working as a university administrator since 2012. He worked at UQAM from 2012-2016, where initially served as Administrative Attaché at the School of Visual and Media Arts, and following that, took on the role of overseeing the university’s audiovisual investments and systems installations for teaching and research. He joined the CRM team in 2022. Benoit holds a bachelor’s degree in music from Université de Montréal and a master’s degree in project management from UQAM.

Alexandre Girouard is a professor of mathematics at Université Laval since 2013. He obtained his PhD in 2008 at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Iosif Polterovich and Marlène Frigon. He specializes in spectral geometry and his research interests deal with problems of isoperimetric type for eigenvalues of the Laplacian and the Dirichlet-Neumann operator on Riemannian varieties.

After obtaining a Ph.D. in operations research at Cornell University, Odile Marcotte taught computer science at the Université de Sherbrooke from 1982 to 1985 and at the Université du Québec à Montréal from 1985 to 2006. In September 2006 she became a Deputy Director of the CRM, a position she held until January 2020. She came back to the CRM in February 2022 as Special Advisor, Partnerships. In 2007 Odile Marcotte organized the first Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, which was followed by 12 other editions, all organized by herself except the 2021 workshop.

Louise Poirier is honourary professor at the Department of Didactics of Université de Montréal. A former Dean of the Faculty of Education, she is a specialist in mathematics education, and has turned towards collaborative research in preschool and elementary school. She led a number of collaborative research projects with schools, particularly with the Kativik School Board and the Inuit community, with the Support Program at the Montreal School as well as with the Regional Academy of the Guelmim region in Morocco. In 2021, she was named a Distinguished Member of the Ordre de l’excellence de l’éducation du Québec.