News

Frithjof Lutscher was awarded a prestigious NSERC’s Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) (2016-19) for his research in mathematical spatial ecology. In his research, Frithjof uses multi-scale models (based on partial differential equations and discrete-time analogues) to explain how the distribution of individuals of a biological population changes as individuals navigate through environments with varying resource abundance. He recently pioneered the analysis of Turing pattern formation in heterogeneous environments.

Frithjof Lutscher explains how longer summers and climate change can have serious impacts on the prey-predator relationship and the extinction of certain species. Read the complete article.

For the 10th consecutive year, Joseph Khoury, a professor from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, joins the national election committee for the Prime Minister's awards for Teaching Excellence. The Prime Minister's Awards for Teaching Excellence have honoured exceptional elementary and secondary school teachers in all disciplines since 1993, with almost 1,500 teachers honoured to date. Recipients are honoured for their remarkable achievements in education and for their commitment to preparing their students for a digital and innovation-based economy.

Congratulations to Ms Yue Dong, whose most recent article, "Threaded Ensembles of Supervised and Unsupervised Neural Networks for Stream Learning" won the best paper award at the 29th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held at the University of Victoria from May 31 to June 3, 2016.  Earlier this spring, her work on “Deep learning in computer vision and visual arts” was distinguished with prizes in two distinct poster competitions. Yue is currently pursuing her MSc in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, with supervisors Vladimir Pestov (Department of Mathematics and Statistics) and Nathalie Japkowicz (EECS). She is an emerging leader in machine learning, which is a domain drawing on deep ideas from mathematical analysis, discrete mathematics and statistics.

Congratulations to Anne Broadbent, winner of the 2016 André Aisenstadt Mathematics Prize of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques! This prize celebrates outstanding research achievement by a young Canadian mathematician. She will deliver her prize lecture at the CRM on September 23. Save the date!

The University of Ottawa established the annual Excellence in Teaching award to recognize educators of exceptional quality, driven by their passion to advance and share knowledge. These leaders in university education are outstanding in the classroom, in the laboratory and in the field.

This year, the committee selected Dr. Victor Leblanc, of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, for his outstanding work in the classroom and graduate student supervision. He was originally nominated by a petition from the students in his course MAT2322: Calculus III for Engineers, who summarized "Dr. Leblanc's enthusiasm and positive attitude is very contagious ... He truly inspires students to strive to success through hard work."   This sentiment was echoed in countless letters of support from his colleagues and students.

Congratulations on a well-deserved award!

From May 7-10, the University of Ottawa hosted the "Workshop on Representation Theory and Analysis on Lie Groups over Local Fields" , organized by Professors Monica Nevins and Hadi Salmasian.  This large research conference attracted over 60 participants from all over North America and Europe.   This conference was generously funded by the Fields Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, the University of Ottawa Vice-President Research Office, and the Faculty of Science Research Office.

The Ecological Society of America has announced that the winner of the 2015 best paper in Theoretical Ecology is  American Naturalist: How individual movement response to habitat edges affects population persistence and spatial spread authored by Gabriel Maciel, PhD Student, and Frithjof Lutscher, Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

From the citation:  “This paper addresses a basic question motivated by ecological dynamics -- how behavior at habitat edges affects population persistence and spatial spread -- and comprehensively presents and analyzes a set of broadly applicable tools for incorporating edge behavior.  In doing so, Maciel & Lutscher nicely balance tractable models with biological realism and clearly describe how their modeling insights fit into the existing theoretical and empirical context.  In addition to advancing the long-standing theory of spatial population dynamics, the findings clearly contribute to the biological understanding of the effect of a variety of movement behaviors, such as faster movement through unfavorable habitat enhancing population persistence and an intermediate strength of patch-quality-based preference enhancing the rate of population spread, with a strong mechanistic understanding for why these dynamics arise. “