One (full) professor and three tenure-track assistant professors were hired during the 1999-2000 academic year. In addition, two associate professors and one tenure-track assistant professor have already been hired this year, to take effect beginning with the 2001-02 academic year.

Shi Jin

Shi Jin, a new (full) professor, received the PhD from the University of Arizona in 1991. His thesis ``Numerical transport in diffusive regimes'' was written under the guidance of C. David Levermore. Before going to Arizona, Shi received a B.S. degree from Peking University (China) in 1983. After the PhD he spent two years at the Courant Institute of NYU, and joined the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology in 1993. While at Georgia Tech, Dr. Jin held several visiting positions, including 3 months at Stanford University.

Shi's research interests lie in the development and study of effective computational and mathematical methods for problems arising in a wide variety of physical and engineering problems. In particular, he is interested in numerical methods for fluid dynamics, rarefied gas dynamics, wave propagation and material sciences. Numerical and computational analysis is of strategic importance on our campus, and Dr. Jin is expected to play a major role. One of Shi's major achievements (with Z.  Xin) was the design of relaxation schemes which allow a much simpler discretization of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws than the usual schemes. Basic to these schemes is the design of a linear supersystem with stiff relaxation terms that relax to the original nonlinear system. These schemes have been widely adopted and developed in many application areas. Recently he began the study of a nonlinear Schrodinger equation with random inhomogeneities. Like a true applied mathematician, he has developed collaborations with engineers and scientists.

Alexandru Ionescu

Alexandru Ionescu, a new assistant professor, received the PhD in 1999 from Princeton University. At Princeton, his advisor was Elias Stein. Dr. Ionescu's undergraduate education was at the University of Bucharest (Romania) and MIT. He won a Silver Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Germany in 1989 and a Gold Medal at the Olympiad in Sweden in 1991. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) in 1999-2000, and is spending the 2000-01 year at MIT before joining us in the fall of 2001.

Alexandru's research area is real analysis on Lie groups. This area involves several branches of mathematics including Fourier analysis, global and harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, differential geometry, and probability theory. One of his striking achievements is a dramatic improvement of the Kunze-Stein phenomenon for L^p. In the case of rank-one semi-simple Lie groups he obtained the optimal form that, in the setting of Lorentz spaces, the convolution of two L^2,1 functions yields a L^2,¥ function. Other aspects of his work concern L_r^p ® L_s^q estimates for the wave operator and the noncentered Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator.

Xianghong Gong

Xianghong Gong, a new assistant professor, received the PhD from the University of Chicago in 1994 where his PhD supervisor was Sidney W. Webster. The title of his thesis was ``Real analytic submanifolds under unimodular transformations.'' Xianghong received B.A. and M.S. degrees at Jilin University and Nanjing University (China), respectively. He spent the year 1994-95 at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and 1995-96 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley). He was assistant professor at the University of Michigan from 1996-1999 and at Oklahoma State University from 1999-2001 (on leave in 2000-01).

Dr. Gong's main research interests are in several complex variables and dynamical systems. In collaboration with Dan Burns, he has been studying singular Levi-flat real analytic hypersurfaces. His most recent research work includes the normalization of holomorphic symplectic mappings admitting invariant Levi-flat real analytic sets, non-reversibilities of real analytic area-preserving mappings and Hamiltonian systems, and the existence of periodic points of symplectic and reversible holomorphic mappings near a fixed point. Gong brings a breadth of knowledge in a number of areas of mathematics that will significantly impact our research programs.

Tonghai Yang

Tonghai Yang, another new assistant professor, received the PhD from the University of Maryland in 1995 with a thesis ``Theta liftings and L-functions of elliptic curves'' written under the direction of Stephen Kudla. Before coming to this country to study, Tonghai received a M.S. degree from Anhui University (China) in 1987. Dr. Yang spent the 1995-96 year at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and was Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan from 1996 to 1998. While at Michigan he spent summers at the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics (Germany). In 1998 he joined the faculty of SUNY at Stony Brook and spent 1999-2000 at Harvard University as an AMS Centennial Fellow.

Tonghai's research interests are in number theory, arithmetic geometry and representation theory. He has worked extensively on the central values and derivatives of Hecke L-functions. One of his striking results is a formula for certain representation densities of quadratic forms. Recently he obtained a striking formula for the central derivative of the L-function of a canonical Hecke character, the derivation of which involved enormous insight and computational skill.

Timo Seppäläinen

Timo Seppäläinen is a newly hired associate professor whose appointment starts in 2001-02. He received an M.Sc. from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland) in 1986 and a PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1991 with a thesis guided by Steven Orey. Timo was an instructor at Ohio State University for two years, a postdoctoral fellow at the IMA (Minnesota), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Mittag-Leffler Institute (Sweden). He went to Iowa State University in 1995 where he currently is associate professor.

Dr. Seppäläinen's research interests are in probability theory, with special interests in interacting particle systems, large deviation theory, combinatorial probability, and statistical mechanics. His current main research concerns the large-scale behavior of interacting particle systems. In a series of papers, he has developed a method for studying certain asymmetric systems where an infinite family of processes is simultaneously constructed so that a complicated process can be represented as an envelope of simpler processes.

Sergey Bolotin

Sergey Bolotin is a newly hired associate professor whose appointment begins with the 2001-02 academic year. He received the D.Sc. from Moscow State University in 1997 with a thesis ``Variational methods in Hamiltonian systems.'' His advisor was V. V. Kozlov. Sergey is currently on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at Moscow State. Dr. Bolotin has been a visiting faculty member in our department in 1996 and 2000; he has also been a visiting faculty member at the University of Trento (Italy). He gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1994.

Sergey's research interests include variational methods in Hamiltonian systems, conditions for nonintegrability and chaotic behavior of Hamilton systems, billiards, rigid body dynamics, and celestial mechanics and inertial navigation. With Z. Z. Kozlov, he received the S. V. Kovalevskaya Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2000 for a series of papers on integrability and nonintegrability of Hamiltonian systems.

Lev Borisov

Lev Borisov is a newly hired assistant professor whose appointment begins in 2001-02. His early education was at Moscow State University, and he was awarded the PhD in 1996 from the University of Michigan. His thesis ``A finiteness theorem for subgroups of Sp(4,Z)'' was written under the guidance of Igor Dolgachev. Lev was a postdoctoral fellow at MSRI (Berkeley) in 1996-97, and since 1997 has been Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University. In 1987 he won first prize at the International Math Olympiad.

Dr. Borisov's research area is algebraic geometry and currently he is working on problems related to mirror symmetry, a byproduct of research by physicists in string theory. He has also interests in number theory and, more recently, in protein folding problems in mathematical biology. The ultimate goal in the latter area is to predict a three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence.

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