MPS Announces New Scientific Board Advisory Members
The Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS) is pleased to announce the appointment of two new members to the Scientific Advisory Board: Angela V. Olinto and Sergiu Klainerman.
Olinto and Klainerman replace David Gabai (Princeton University) and Tal Rabin (University of Pennsylvania), whose terms as board members have concluded. MPS thanks Gabai and Rabin for their work and guidance.
Olinto is a professor of astronomy and physics and the provost of Columbia University. She previously taught at the University of Chicago, where she was the Dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences and the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute. She also served as chair of the university’s astronomy and astrophysics department from 2003 to 2006 and from 2012 to 2017.
Olinto is known for her work on the structure of neutron stars, primordial inflationary theory, cosmic magnetic fields, dark matter and the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays, gamma-rays, and neutrinos. Formerly a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, she is the principal investigator of the POEMMA (Probe of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics) and EUSO-SPB (Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon) space missions, which are designed to discover the origin of the highest energy cosmic particles, their sources and their interactions.
Olinto is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. She is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Klainerman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. He received his B.S. from Bucharest University in Romania in 1974 and his Ph.D. from New York University (NYU) in 1978. After serving as a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and an assistant professor at NYU, he joined Princeton University in 1987.
Klainerman has made many important contributions to the study of nonlinear wave equations in continuum mechanics, relativistic field theories and general relativity (GR). He introduced the vectorfield method and the null condition, both influential tools for the study of long-time behavior of solutions to nonlinear systems of wave equations. He has also proved the global nonlinear stability of the Minkowski space; provided a proof for the bounded L 2 curvature theorem; established the first smooth rigidity result of Kerr black holes; and proved far-reaching extensions of Demetrios Christodoulou’s work on the formation of black holes.
In recent work, Klainerman has made decisive contributions to the study of the well-known Kerr stability problem, first by proving the global stability of Schwarzschild under polarized perturbations and recently by extending the result to unconditional perturbations of slowly rotating Kerr black holes.
Klainerman is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the French Academy of Sciences’ Le Conte Prize and the American Mathematics Society’s Bôcher Memorial Prize. He serves as an editor for various journals such as the Annals of Mathematics and the Annals of PDE.
