New York University has named Russel Caflisch, professor of mathematics at UCLA and director of the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
New York University has named Russel Caflisch, professor of mathematics at UCLA and director of the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, director of NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Caflisch will assume the post on September 1, 2017.
“In the field of mathematics, and especially in applied mathematics, few names are more prominent or respected than the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences,” said NYU President Andrew Hamilton. “The Abel Prize, the National Medal of Science, the Chern Medal, the Fields Medal -- these are just a sample of the honors that Courant’s scholars have been accorded.
“In selecting a new director, we sought someone who had an outstanding record of scholarship, unquestioned stature in the field, a record of advancing a scholarly enterprise, and an outlook that fits with NYU’s -- ambitious, entrepreneurial, and global. In Russ Caflisch, we have found just the right person. We are proud and very pleased that Russ will be joining NYU as the new director of the Courant Institute.”
A mathematician with wide-ranging scholarly interests, including materials science, mathematical finance, Monte Carlo methods, kinetic theory, plasma dynamics, fluid dynamics, and partial differential equations, Caflisch earned his doctorate at the Courant Institute (1978), where he was an advisee of George Papanicolaou.
Caflisch, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State (1975), served on the mathematics faculty at Courant from 1979 to 1989.
Caflisch has been professor of mathematics at UCLA since 1989 and a faculty member in the university’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering since 2002. He has been the director of the NSF’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, housed at UCLA, since 2008 and was a founding member of the California NanoSystems Institute.
He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and was an invited lecturer at the SIAM National Meeting and at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Caflisch was previously an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellow.
EDITOR’S NOTE
New York University’s Courant Institute is a leading center for research and education in mathematics and computer science. For over eighty years, its faculty, recipients of four Abel Prizes and numerous other awards and honors, have contributed to U.S. and international science and engineering by promoting an integrated view of mathematics and computation. For more, please visit cims.nyu.edu.