GeoCoW2020 - Speakers

Michael Bronstein is a professor at Imperial College London, where he holds the Chair in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, and Head of Graph Learning Research at Twitter.

His main research expertise is in theoretical and computational methods for geometric data analysis, a field in which he has published extensively in the leading journals and conferences. He is credited as one of the pioneers of geometric deep learning, generalizing machine learning methods to graph-structured data.

Michael received his PhD from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in 2007. He has held visiting appointments at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Tel Aviv University. During 2017-2018 he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Since 2017, he is a Rudolf Diesel fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, TU Munich.

Michael received four ERC grants, two Google Faculty awards, and is a Fellow of IEEE and IAPR, ACM Distinguished Speaker, and World Economic Forum Young Scientist. His industrial experience includes technological leadership in multiple startup companies, including Novafora, Invision (acquired by Intel in 2012) and Fabula AI (acquired by Twitter in 2019). He has previously served as Principal Engineer at Intel Perceptual Computing, where he was a key contributor to the development of the Intel RealSense 3D sensing technology.

Elisenda Feliu is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.

She holds a PhD in pure Mathematics from the University of Barcelona (2007), after which she decided to reorient her research career into mathematical biology, and took a Master in Bioinformatics, also in Barcelona (2008). In 2010 she became a postdoc at the Bioinformatics Research Center in Aarhus, and since then, she has been developing theory to study mathematical models of biochemical reaction networks, mainly by employing ideas and tools from algebraic geometry and computational algebra.

She was one of the recipients of the prestigious Sapere Aude starting grant from the Independent Research Fund of Denmark in 2014, and is currently a member of the Young Academy of Denmark (2015-2020).

Kathryn Hess Bellwald graduated with a PhD in mathematics from MIT and was then a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of Stockholm, Nice, and Toronto, and, finally, at the EPFL, where she became titular professor in 1999 and associate professor of mathematics and life sciences in 2015 and full professor in 2019.

Her research concerns both pure mathematics and innovative applications of mathematics: in material science, computer science, cancer biology, and, especially, neuroscience.

Philippe Jacquod received the Diplom degree in theoretical physics from the ETHZ, Zürich, Switzerland, in 1992, and the PhD degree in natural sciences from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in 1997.

He is a professor with the engineering department, University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, Sion, Switzerland, with a joint appointment with the Department of Quantum Matter Physics, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

From 2003 to 2005 he was an assistant professor with the theoretical physics department, University of Geneva, Switzerland and from 2005 to 2013 he was a professor with the physics department, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.

His main research topic is in power systems and how they evolve as the energy transition unfolds. He has published more than 100 papers in international journals, books and conference proceedings.

Ioan Manolescu is a professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

His research interests lie in probability, more precisely in problems inspired by statistical mechanics. He specifically works with percolation, the random-cluster and Potts models, and self-avoiding walk.

Previously, he was a student of the ENS Paris and has obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Geoffrey Grimmett in 2012. From 2012 to 2015 he was a postdoc at the University of Geneva, in the group of Stanislav Smirnov and Hugo Duminil-Copin.

Toshiyuki Nakagaki is a professor of Mathematical and Physical Ethology Laboratory at the Research Center of Mathematics for Social Creativity, Research Institute for Electronic Science (RIES), Hokkaido University (Sapporo). Currently he is the director of RIES.

He graduated from Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science, Hokkaido University (Master in 1989) and worked for Pfizer Inc. (Central Research Center, Nagoya) for 5 years. After quitting Pfizer, he joined Nagoya University (Graduate School of Human Informatics) where he got a PhD in biophysics in 1997 while working as a part-time teacher in a correspondence high school. His thesis title was 'Amoeboid cell behaviors based on self -organization of nonlinear chemical oscillators'. His post-doc research was done at the RIKEN Institute

He became an associate professor at Hokkaido University in 2000 and conducted an experimental and mathematical study on how an amoeba of slime mold designed multi-functional transport network. After becoming a professor in Faculty of Complex and Intelligent Systems, Future University Hakodate in 2010, he joined Hokkaido University in 2013.

He was awarded the IgNobel Prize two times: in 2008 and 2010.

Alan C. Newell, Regents' Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona, was born in Dublin on Guy Fawkes day in 1941. He currently lives and enjoys the outdoor life in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife Tish who deserves most of the credit for bringing up two sons, Jamie and Matt, and two daughters, Shane and Pippa, each of whom makes their parents very proud. Summers are spent on the most beautiful coastline on earth in northwest Donegal.

He received degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1962 and from MIT in 1966. He has chaired departments of Mathematics at Clarkson University, at the University of Arizona and at the University of Warwick, England, from 1971 until 2000, a period of almost thirty years. He played his last game of rugby at age 58 and afterwards still managed to lift his pint of Guinness unaided.

In addition to his research in optics and ocean waves and turbulence and pattern formation, he loves literature and poetry and is an unashamed wannabe story teller who gets great pleasure out of writing yarns and plays with a twist.

Gerd Schröder-Turk received his PhD degree from the Australian National University in 2005, for his thesis 'Skeletons in the Labyrinth' on geometric aspects of the self-assembly of bicontinuous phases in soft matter systems.

He refers to his field of research as 'Materials geometry', that is, the materials science and physics of complex nanostructured materials addressed through the goggles of geometry. His research revolves around the role, formation and quantitative description of structure in soft matter and biological systems, and its repercussions for physical properties and function.

He has held academic appointments at the Australian National University, at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and Murdoch University, and has been a visiting fellow of the Australian National University, Swinburne University, Lund University and Copenhagen University.

He completed a habilition degree at the FAU in 2013, and was awarded the Emmy-Noether-Prize in 2014 and the Camurus Lipid Research Foundation Fellowship Award in 2019.

He is currently an Associate Professor at Murdoch University in Perth, an elected member of the Senate of Murdoch University and a member of the National Executive of the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP).

Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his name) is a professor of disease modelling at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Using mathematics, he studies infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria, human papillomavirus, influenza, neglected tropical diseases... and zombies.

He’s published almost 100 academic articles; is a winner of a Guinness World Record for his work on modelling a zombie invasion; was the winner of the 2015 Mathematics Ambassador award, given by Canada's Partners in Research association; and won the 2018 Society for Mathematical Biology Distinguished Service Award for exceptional contribution to the field of mathematical biology and its advancement outside of research.

Outside of his day job, he’s the author of Who is the Doctor, Who’s 50 and The Doctors Are In (ECW Press), guides to the wonderful world of Doctor Who. He's also the editor extraordinaire of the Outside In series of pop-culture reviews with a twist (ATB Publishing), covering Doctor Who, Star Trek, Buffy, Angel and Firefly.

Oh, and he’s the world’s leading expert on the transmission of Bieber Fever, but let’s not worry about that one.