Plenary Talks

Plenary Talk 1

Professor Andrea L. Bertozzi (University of California Los Angeles)

Biography: Andrea Bertozzi is an applied mathematician with expertise in nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid dynamics. She also works in the areas of geometric methods for image processing, crime modeling and analysis, and swarming/cooperative dynamics. Bertozzi completed all her degrees in Mathematics at Princeton. She was an L. E. Dickson Instructor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 1991-1995. She was the Maria Geoppert-Mayer Distinguished Scholar at Argonne National Laboratory from 1995-6. She was on the faculty at Duke University from 1995-2004 first as Associate Professor of Mathematics and then as Professor of Mathematics and Physics. She has served as the Director of the Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems while at Duke. Bertozzi moved to UCLA in 2003 as a Professor of Mathematics. Since 2005 she has served as Director of Applied Mathematics, overseeing the graduate and undergraduate research training programs at UCLA. In 2012 she was appointed the Betsy Wood Knapp Chair for Innovation and Creativity. Bertozzi's honors include the Sloan Research Fellowship in 1995, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1996, and SIAM's Kovalevsky Prize in 2009. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and to the Fellows of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2010. She became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. She won a SIAM outstanding paper prize in 2014 with Arjuna Flenner, for her work on geometric graph-based algorithms for machine learning. Bertozzi is a Thomson-Reuters `highly cited' Researcher in mathematics for both 2015 and 2016, one of about 100 worldwide in her field.

Plenary Talk 2

Professor Adilson E. Motter (Northwestern University)

Biography: Motter's research is focused on the dynamical behavior of complex systems and networks. He is the Charles Morrison Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, where he holds an Endowed Full Professor position since 2011. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2002, and prior to joining the Northwestern faculty in 2006 he held positions as Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies of LANL and as Guest Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. Motter’s honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the Weinberg Award for Excellence in Mentoring, the Erdös-Rényi Prize in Network Science, and a Simons Foundation Fellowship. Motter is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has served in the editorial boards of various journals, including Chaos, Nonlinearity, and Physical Review X, and as the Chair of the APS Topical Group on Statistical & Nonlinear Physics.

Plenary Talk 3

Professor Kurt A. Wiesenfeld (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Biography: Kurt Wiesenfeld was born in New York in 1958, the youngest of four children. He earned a B.S. in Physics from M.I.T. in 1979, and a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1985. After postdoctoral training at UC Santa Cruz and Brookhaven National Lab, he joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 1987. He has co-authored 150+ scientific articles involving applications of nonlinear science, mostly on problems in physics and technology, but also chemistry, biology, and neuroscience. He has received funding from the Office of Naval Research, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; he has been a consultant for the Toyota Motor Corporation, The City of New York, Scientific Atlanta, HRL Laboratories, American Defense Systems, and Lockheed-Martin. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001, and in 2010 he received the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi faculty award for sustained research. Wiesenfeld has been married to Karla Jennings since 1985. Their twin daughters, Alexis and Sophia, just turned 17.