WELCOME TO INCOMING FACULTY AND
NEW POSTDOCTORAL APPOINTEES

It is a pleasure to welcome the new members of the School of Mathematics — Professor Ofer Zeitouni and Assistant Professors Tian-Jun Li and Ezra Miller. We also welcome the new Dunham Jackson Assistant Professor Christof Melcher, as well as Postdoctoral Associates Marshall Hampton, McKay Hyde and Jeremy Martin. We are also very pleased to welcome new staff members Harry Singh, who replaces Monika Stumpf as Executive Assistant to the department head, and Rhonda Dragan, who replaces Becky Johnston as Administrative Aide at the MCIM.

Professor Ofer Zeitouni is a world leader in probability theory and its applications. He has made important contributions to the theory of large deviations, random walks, random matrix theory, and filtering and statistical detection. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Technion (Israel) in 1986 and rose there to the rank of Professor of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics. He has held visiting appointments at a number of leading institutions including MIT, UC Berkeley, and ETH Zurich. His honors include the Bergmann Memorial Research Award (1991), as well as an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Beijing 2002.

Assistant Professor Tian-Jun Li earned his Ph.D. in 1996 from Brandeis University. He spent the following three years as a Gibbs Instructor at Yale University and as a Visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. From 1999 to 2002 he was on the faculty of Princeton University. His research area is symplectic topology.

Assistant Professor Ezra Miller earned his Ph.D. in 2000 from UC Berkeley and spent the past two years at MIT as an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow. His other honors include a Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, a Julia B. Robinson Fellowship and the Charles B. Morrey Award, all of which he received while a graduate student at UC Berkeley. His research areas are algebraic geometry, combinatorics, commutative algebra and mathematical physics. He is spending the 2002 - 2003 academic year as a visiting researcher at MSRI Berkeley.

Dunham Jackson Assistant Professor Christof Melcher received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Max-Planck-Institute, Leipzig. His research areas are partial differential equations and applications to problems in continuum mechanics, magnetism and materials science.
NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow Marshall Hampton earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Washington. His research areas are dynamical systems, celestial mechanics and image processing.

NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow McKay Hyde earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from Caltech. His research areas are numerical solutions of PDE with emphasis on high-order methods, fast algorithms, integral formulations and spectral methods.

NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow Jeremy Martin earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of California at San Diego. His research areas are combinatorics and algebraic geometry.