Structure
International Scientific Advisory Committee
The International Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC) advises the CRM on all scientific orientations: selection, organisation and elaboration of the thematic programs (annual programs, semestral programs and short programs), elaboration of the general and multidisciplinary programs and all other important activities.
The International Scientific Advisory Committee meets at the CRM at least once a year, and several times a year by videoconference. Here is a list of its members:
Formerly an assistant professor of Mathematics and Data Science with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, Afonso S. Bandeira is since May 2019 a full professor of Mathematics at ETH Zurich. He holds a BS and MS in Mathematics from University of Coimbra (Portugal), and did his PhD at the Program of Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. He joined NYU after a year as an instructor at the department of Mathematics at MIT.
Afonso’s interests are in Mathematics of Data Science, broadly defined. These include connections with Probability, Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, Discrete Math, Image/Signal Processing, and Physics.
Lia Bronsard is one of Canada’s leading mathematical analysts, whose interests lie in the field of partial differential equations and the calculus of variations. She specializes in the study of singular limits of solutions of partial differential equations. Her research brings rigorous methods of analysis to bear on problems arising in the physical sciences, and in particular those involving singular geometrical structures such as vortices, phase transition layers, and grain boundaries.
Bronsard was born in Québec in 1963 and received her Baccalauréat ès sciences in mathematics from the Université de Montréal in 1983. She received her Ph.D. in 1988 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, working with R. V. Kohn on the De Giorgi conjecture connecting singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion equations and mean curvature flow. After her degree, she held positions at Brown University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Nonlinear Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1992, she moved to McMaster University, where she is now a Professor of Mathematics.
During the period after her thesis, Bronsard worked on energy driven pattern formation in collaboration with B. Stoth and others. Her paper with F. Reitich on the structure of triple-junction layers in grain boundaries, from her period at CMU, was the first mathematical analysis of these multiphase singular structures and has been highly influential.
In her current research, Bronsard studies the detailed structures of vortices in the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation and in the Ginzburg-Landau models of superconductivity. In this area, her work, in collaboration with S. Alama, T. Giorgi, P. Mironescu, E. Sandier and colleague J. Berlinsky from Physics at McMaster University, sets a very high standard of quality, and is a model of interdisciplinary research.
She is president of the Canadian Mathematical Society for the 2014-2016 term.
Miranda Holmes-Cerfon received her BSc in 2005 in Honours Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and her PhD in 2010 in Applied Mathematics and Atmosphere-Ocean Science from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. Following that she was a Harvard Instructor in Applied Mathematics for 2 years, and then returned to New York as Courant Instructor and then Assistant professor of mathematics. She is broadly interested in problems in applied mathematics, and has contributed to understanding a range of systems from lava tubes to ocean waves to sphere packing. Her current research interest is in statistical mechanics at the nano- and microscale, with the aim of finding principles and building algorithms to design new materials. She is the recipient of a US Department of Energy Early Career Award, and a 2018 Alfred P Sloan Fellowship in Mathematics.
Pierre Colmez studied at the École normale supérieure, and earned his Ph.D. degree at the Université de Grenoble under the direction of John Coates and J.-M. Fontaine. Having previously held positions at the Max-Planck Institut für Mathematik and the École Polytechnique, he is presently a Directeur de recherche at the CNRS, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998 and at the European Congress of Mathematics in 2012, and has given distinguished lecture series at many institutions, including the Aisenstadt Chair lectures at the CRM in 2015.
Colmez’ main mathematical contributions were focused in the beginning on p-adic Galois representations and p-adic L-functions, for which he was awarded the Fermat Prize in 2005. More recently, his work has centered on the p-adic Local Langlands Correspondence, where he introduced a functor that became known as the ” Montreal functor “. In 2016 he was awarded the Léonid Frank prize by the Académie des sciences.
Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the Université de Montréal since 2003, Octav Cornea, obtained his doctorate at the University of Rochester in 1993 and, in 1994, he became Professor at the University of Lille 1, where he remained until 2002. He was 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, over the last twenty years, mainly to symplectic topology. He was a Simons Fellow (2015-2016), member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2015-2016), Research Professor at the Mathematical Science Research Institute at Berkeley (2009) and invited speaker at the Inaugural Mathematical Congress of the Americas in 2013.
Olivier Lafitte is Director of the CNRS IRL-CRM. He is also professor at the Galilée Institute of Paris 13 University in Villetaneuse since 2001 and researcher at LAGA (Laboratory of Analysis, Geometry and Applications) (UMR 7539) as well as member of the Modeling and Scientific Computing team. He is also the Director of the graduate school (engineering education) in applied mathematics at Paris 13 University, MACS (Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing) since 2003.
His areas of interest are varied, around partial differential equations and ordinary differential equations. Its applications range from electric and electro-magnetic wave diffraction to Schrödinger’s spectral theory, hydrodynamic instabilities and their mathematical formulation, from multi-physical coupling problems for the existence and uniqueness of solutions, to modeling in biology and the use of PDEs in stochastic calculus for finance. He has been collaborating with Montréal colleagues for a long time and has signed an agreement in 2015 between the universities of Montréal and Paris 13 for the exchange of master’s students in mathematical finance.
Dusa McDuff is the Helen Lyttle Kimmel ’42 professor of Mathematics at Barnard College at Columbia University in New York. She gained her early teaching experience at the University of York, the University of Warwick and at 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 1988. Prof. McDuff has honorary doctorates from four universities (Edinburgh, York, Strasbourg and Pierre et Marie Curie). She is a fellow of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and an honorary member of Girton College in Cambridge. She has received the Satter Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Outstanding Woman Scientist Award from the AWIS (Association for Women in Science). Ms. McDuff’s service to the math 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 two fundamental books on symplectic topology as well as several articles in collaboration with François Lalonde. Dusa McDuff is a member of the CRM International Scientific Committee (since 2013) and has been the Chair since January 2020.
Javad Mashreghi is a faculty member at Laval University and the author of more than one hundred papers and eleven books and has edited nine proceedings. He received the CMS G. de B. Robinson Award for his exceptional publication at the Canadian Journal of Mathematics in 2004 and has published papers on a wide variety of subjects such as operator theory, function theory, complex analysis, matrix theory, functional analysis, potential theory, optimization, mathematical biology, electrical engineering and metallurgy.
Dr. Mashreghi was the chair of pure math section in the evaluation group of NSERC for the Discovery Grant in 2016, and was an NSF panelist in 2019. He has served in the Board of Directors of CRM, Scientific Advisory Panel of AARMS (two mandates) and in the Executive Committee of CMS as the Vice-President (Québec), and chaired the Publication Committee of CMS during the transition to the Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Mashreghi has been on the editorial boards of CJM, CMB, PAMS, and Concrete Operators. He is a member at large of the Publication Committee of AMS, and a member of the Mathematical Council of the Americas. He serves as president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2020 to 2022.
Sylvie Méléard was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-aux-Roses (Sciences), graduated in mathematics and defended her thesis in 1984 under the direction of Nicole El Karoui at Université Paris VI. She became a professor at Université Paris X-Nanterre before teaching, as a professor of probability, at École Polytechnique starting in September 2006. She was president of the Department of Applied Mathematics from 2010 to 2014 and is responsible for the Population Evolution and Interacting Particle Systems (PEIPS) team. She is currently editor-in-chief of Stochastic Processes and their Applications.
She is Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, obtained the La Recherche 2013 prize, was an Invited Speaker at 7ECM (2016) and was recently elected to the European Academy of Sciences (2018).
The first areas of interest of Sylvie Méléard focused on the probabilistic interpretation of nonlinear partial differential equations and stochastic particle models before moving towards random modeling in ecology / evolution with a particular interest for individual behaviors and their derivation under different parameter regimes. In this capacity, she is the holder of the Mathematical Modeling and Biodiversity Chair, created jointly by the École Polytechnique, the National Museum of Natural History and Veolia, which develops a multidisciplinary approach to ecosystem modeling, in order to respond to various questions. ranging from environmental issues (adaptive evolution, spatial colonization, analysis of community dynamics and construction of biodiversity scenarios) to medical issues (antibiotic resistance, invasion of cancer mutations).
André Arroja Neves is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2005 under the supervision of Richard Schoen and subsequently held positions at Princeton University and Imperial College London. André Neves has made outstanding contributions to geometric analysis and differential geometry. In particular, in his joint work with F. C. Marques, he proved the Willmore conjecture, one of the famous open problems in the field that remained unsolved for almost half a century. André Neves has been awarded numerous honors for his work, including the 2013 LMS Whitehead Prize, the 2016 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize and the 2016 AMS Oswald Veblen Prize. In 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. André Neves was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul in 2014 and has given many distinguished lecture series, including the CRM Nirenberg Lectures in 2015.
Robert Pego has been a professor at Carnegie Mellon since 2004. He received his A.B. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and obtained his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin, and became assistant professor at the University of Michigan before being a professor at the University of Maryland for 14 years.
His research interest include dynamics in infinite-dimensional physical systems, universal scaling behavior in models of clustering and coarsening, stability of nonlinear waves, and numerical methods for incompressible viscous flow.
Jeremy Quastel is widely recognized as one of the top probabilists in the world, having made major advances in the fields of hydrodynamic theory, stochastic partial differential equations, and integrable probability. He is particularly recognized for a series of ground-breaking works during the last ten years related to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation and the wider class of random growth models conjectured to share the same long-time, large-scale limit (the so-called KPZ universality class). He proved a 25 year old conjecture from physics about the scaling exponents for the KPZ equation, as well as computing an exact formula for its one-point distribution. He demonstrated that the KPZ equation is universal in that it arises as a scaling limit of a wide variety of non-linear stochastic partial differential equations of Hamilton-Jacobi type. Most recently, he constructed and computed transition probabilities for the ‘KPZ fixed point’ Markov process, which should be the universal long-time limit of all models in the KPZ universality class. Among his earlier contributions, Quastel derived the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation from a class of interacting particle systems, derived equations for the behaviour of the internal diffusion-limited-aggregation model, and proved a conjecture about the speed of the traveling front for the stochastic Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov equation, which models branching diffusion processes.
For the profound impact of his work, Quastel has been recognized as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2016), and was the recipient of a Killam Research Fellowship (2013). He delivered an invited address at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad India.
Jeremy Quastel received his Ph.D. from the Courant Institute in 1990. After six years at the University of California, Davis, he moved to his present position at the University of Toronto in 1998.
Professor Nicolai Reshetikhin is a full professor at the Department of Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley. He is also a full professor at the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Quantum Geometry of Moduli Spaces at Aarhus University. After receiving his PhD from Leningrad University in 1984, Reshetikin held positions at Steklov Mathematical Institute and at Harvard University, before moving to the University of Berkeley in 1991. His groundbreaking research lies at the nexus of several branches of mathematics and mathematical physics, including quantum field theory, low-dimensional topology, and statistical mechanics. He was one of two founding editors of the European Mathematical Society journal Quantum Topology.
Reshetikhin is a Fellow of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters and a 2015 Simons Fellow in Mathematics. Other recognitions of Reshetikhin’s fundamental contributions to mathematical research include a Sloan Fellowship, a Humboldt Research Award, a Niels Bohr Visiting Professorship, a plenary lecture at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematical Physics, two invited lectures at the International Congress of Mathematicians (a sectional lecture in 1990, and a plenary lecture in 2010), and a plenary lecture at the 2008 European Congress of Mathematicians.
