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Sara van de Geer obtained a Ph.D. in Statistics in 1987 at the University of Leiden, under the supervision of Prof. R.D. Gill and Prof. W.R. van Zwet.
After various positions in Holland, Bristol and Toulouse, she became in 2005 Full Professor at the ETH Zürich, where she is now chair of the Seminar for Statistics. Her research interests are in high-dimensional statistics, empirical processes, and statistical learning theory. She has written three books, and two more are in preparation. She is currently associate editor of Statistical Surveys, The Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, and of Probability Theory and Related Fields. She is a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation Research Council. This year, she presented an invited lecture at the International Conference of Mathematicians.
I was born in Hungary, where I live currently as well. I am 49, married and have two children, my son, Bence, 18 and my daughter, Krisztina, 9.
Both my M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses, written in 1986 in Budapest at Eötvös Loránd University, and in 1990 at Moscow State University, studied certain statistical problems of Markov random fields described by stochastic partial differential equations. From fall 1991 to spring 1993, I continued my research as a postdoctoral fellow in Nagoya, Japan, studying the domain dependence of the prediction of Lévy’s Brownian motion and some other random fields. I regard my supervisors M. Arató (M.Sc.), Yu.A. Rozanov (Ph.D.) and T. Hida (post-doc.) as my ultimate masters from whom I not only learned the profession, but also learned the ways of intuitive, research-minded thinking, hard work and responsibility, helpful and very human scientific guidance. Aside of them, such excellent scientists influenced my early career as A.N. Shiryaev whose seminars I regularly attended, and V.M. Zolotarev who personally encouraged me to build an academic career. Around the mid-1990s, I turned to more applied and interdisciplinary research fields. To carry out the statistical modelling of groundwater in Hungary, I found interested partners, I.L. Dryden from Nottingham and C.C. Taylor from Leeds, who substantially influenced my scientific thinking and with whom we became friends, also. My current interest stems from various risk analyses, and focuses to systems with nonlinear interdependences; their complex modelling, the ways of description and identification of the interdependence structure and its effect on the extremal behaviour of the phenomenon.
During the years of research, I gradually built a school from devoted students, and some of them are already well in advance in their early scientific career.
I obtained appointment to the Eötvös Loránd University in 1990 where I work presently as well. I carried out research in strong international cooperation and co-headed a joint German-Hungarian scientific exchange project (1998 – 2000). As TEMPUS grantee, I visited several Institutions in the UK (for example, the Government Actuary's Department, the Institute of Actuaries and several universities) at a number of occasions. I participated in the work of the PRO-ENBIS project of the EU for establishing the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS). I initiated and directed the organization of the 1996 Conference on Stochastic Differential and Difference Equations as a satellite event to the 4th Bernoulli Congress. I headed a number of thematic research projects sponsored by the Hungarian National Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) and other governmental organizations, as well as Insurance Companies and Banks.
I am a member of the Bernoulli Society permanently from 1990 onward. I became a member of the European Regional Committee in 2008 that I have chaired from September 2010.
Claudio Landim was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics from PUC-Rio – Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro – in 1985, and his Ph.D. in Probability theory from the Université Paris VII in 1990. This year he joined the CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – in France at the Université de Rouen. In 1994, after spending two years at the Courant Institute, New York University, he was appointed at IMPA – Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada – in Rio de Janeiro, where he is presently the deputy director.
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Tom Liggett received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1969 under the direction of Samuel Karlin. He has spent his entire academic career in the Mathematics Department at UCLA, where he has served as undergraduate and administrative vice chair, and department chair. He was chief editor of the Annals of Probability during 1985 – 1987 and has held Sloan and Guggenheim fellowships. He was an invited speaker at the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians, and was the IMS Wald Lecturer in 1996. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2008.
Most of Liggett’s work has been in the area of interacting particle systems, which is devoted to the mathematically rigorous analysis of large classes of probabilistic models that arise in many fields, including physics and biology. He published monographs on this topic in 1985 and 1999. His most recent book is Continuous Time Markov Processes: An Introduction, which was published in March, 2010 by the AMS.
