THE SCHOOL WELCOMES
INCOMING FACULTY AND POSTDOCS

It is a pleasure to welcome the new members of the School of Mathematics - Professors Douglas Arnold and Carme Calderer who are husband and wife, Professor Andrew Odlyzko, Professor Peter Polacik, Associate Professors Arnd Scheel and Alexander Voronov, and Assistant Professors Wojciech Chacholski and Markus Keel. Professor Arnold is also the new director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), replacing the outgoing director, Professor Willard Miller, who decided to return to teaching and research. Professor Odlyzko is the first director of the newly established Digital Technology Center (DTC) and an assistant vice president for research. We also welcome the new Dunham Jackson Assistant Professors Bernard Badzioch, Junho Lee and Jianfeng Zhang, as well as Postdoctoral Associates Reka Albert, Chetan Gadgil and Maria Gracheva.

Professor Arnold, the new IMA Director, is one of the world's leaders in numerical analysis of partial differential equations, particularly those dealing with mechanics. He has made major contributions to the numerical simulation of elastic plates and shells and also of incompressible fluids. In recent years he has been working in the area of computational relativity, which seeks numerical solutions of Einstein's field equations. Douglas Arnold earned his Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Chicago. His first position was at the University of Maryland. In 1989 he joined the faculty of Penn State University as Professor and was made Distinguished Professor in 1995. At Penn State he was also co-director of the Center for Computational Mathematics and Applications, the associate director of the Institute for High Performance Computing Applications, and a member of the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry. His major honors and recognitions include the first Giovanni Sacchi Landriani Prize of the Milan Academy of Arts and Letters and an invitation to give a Plenary Lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing in August 2002. For more about Professor Arnold, see the article about the IMA. .

Professor Maria-Carme Calderer is a well known applied mathematician whose research interests include mathematical studies of liquid crystals. She earned her doctorate from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in 1980. She has been at Penn State since 1989 where she was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1993. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the IMA (1984-1985) as well as a visiting researcher in 1986-1987 and 1995-1996. She also has an active interest in mathematics education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as K-12 education.

Professor Peter Polacik has made important contributions in the areas of partial differential equations and dynamical systems. He earned his doctorate from Comenius University, Bratislava, in 1989, where he rose to the rank of Professor. He has been a frequent visiting researcher to leading institutions throughout the world, including the IMA (Fall 1989) and Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Fall 1995).

Professor Andrew Odlyzko is a mathematician of world renown whose research interests cover large areas of pure and applied mathematics and computer science, including number heory, combinatorics, analysis, probability theory, computational complexity, cryptography, coding theory, electronic publishing, electronic commerce and economics of data networks. In addition to his position on the mathematics faculty, Professor Odlyzko is the first director of the University's new Digital Technology Center (DTC), Assistant Vice President for Research, and ADC Telecommunications Chair Professor. For more details about the DTC see www.dtc.umn.edu as well as our article on the DTC.

Andrew Odlyzko earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1975 and joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, now AT&T Labs, where he held high level positions for nearly two decades, most recently, since 1996, as head of the mathematics and cryptography research department. His major honors include an invited one-hour address at the annual AMS meeting, Pittsburgh 1981, as well as an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Berkeley 1986. He also serves on the editorial boards of many leading mathematics, computing, communications, and digital technology journals and has been a member of advisory or governing boards for leading educational institutions throughout the country, including the IMA.

Associate Professor Arnd Scheel's research is in the area of dynamics of partial differential equations. He earned his doctorate from the University of Stuttgart in 1994 and joined the faculty of the Free University, Berlin. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Paper Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for the year 2000.

Associate Professor Alexander Voronov's research interests lie in mathematical physics, algebra, algebraic geometry and topology. He earned his Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1988, where he held a research position until 1990. In the US he has had faculty positions at MIT, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, among others. He was a visiting researcher at Max-Planck Institute, Institute for Advanced Study and IHES, and was awarded an AMS Centennial Research Fellowship, 1996-1998. He earned a Good Teaching Award from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995.

Assistant Professor Wojciech Chacholski earned his Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of Notre Dame. His field of research is algebraic topology. From 1995 to 1997 he held a J.E. Marsden Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Fields Institute (Toronto), followed by a G. Faltings Postdoctoral Fellowship at Max-Planck Institute (1997-1998). From 1998 to 2001 he was a Gibbs Instructor at Yale University, taking a one-year leave of absence (1999-2000) to hold a Gustafsson Fellowship at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm). He is spending the current academic year there as well, on leave from our department.

Assistant Professor Markus Keel earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1995. He held a Hedrick Assistant Professorship at UCLA (1995-1998), followed by Bateman and Taussky-Todd Research Instructorships at Caltech (1998-1999, 1999-2001). He held visiting memberships at MSRI Berkeley, as well as the Institute for Advanced Study. While at UCLA, he earned the Sorgenfrey Teaching Award. His research areas are partial differential equations and harmonic analysis.

Dunham Jackson Assistant Professor Bernard Badzioch earned his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Notre Dame. He spent the academic year 2000-2001 as a visiting faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. His research area is algebraic topology and homotopy theory.

Dunham Jackson Assistant Professor Junho Lee earned his Ph.D. in 2001 from Michigan State University. His research area is symplectic geometry and Gromov-Witten invariants.

Dunham Jackson Assistant Professor Jianfeng Zhang earned his Ph.D. in 2001 from Purdue University. His research area is stochastic differential equations and mathematical finance.

Postdoctoral Associate Reka Albert earned her Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Notre Dame. Her research area is mathematical biology and complex networks.

Postdoctoral Associate Chetan Gadgil earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2001. His research area is mathematical modeling in biology.

Postdoctoral Associate Maria Gracheva earned her Ph.D. in 1998 from Moscow State Technical University. Her research area is biophysics.