Kudos to CUHK Mathematician

Prof. Zou Jun, Chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Choh-Ming Li Professor of Mathematics at CUHK, has been honoured by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) as a Fellow of the 2022 Class in recognition of his contributions to numerical methods and analyses of direct and inverse problems of partial differential equations.

‘I feel deeply honoured to be elected as an AMS Fellow. The Fellowship is a recognition of my contributions to the community and my achievements in applied and computational mathematics, especially in the frontier research areas such as computational electromagnetism, physical interface and inverse problems, and scientific computing,’ said Professor Zou.

Professor ZOU is an internationally renowned and recognized applied and computational mathematician. His research focuses on enhancing and analyzing the efficacy and accuracy of numerical methods for large-scale scientific problems for applications in diverse fields, including machine learning, medical and seismic imaging, engineering and geophysics. He was made a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2019 for his outstanding contributions to these fields. Professor Zou is currently one of the few non-US mathematicians who has been honoured with both AMS and SIAM Fellowships, which are among the most significant and prestigious accolades for mathematicians.

‘There are two key forces behind my research achievements in the frontier research in applied mathematics. On the one hand, I feel highly honoured to have had six separate long-term distinguished collaborative teams in the US, Germany, France, the UK, Switzerland and the Mainland for over two decades. On the other hand, I have been extremely lucky to have many talented postgraduate students at CUHK and feel very proud of their important contributions to this research field. More than 10 of them are now working as faculty members in top universities around the world, and another 10 are the recipients of the prestigious Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme. More excitingly, I see the recent public and societal realization of the significance and fundamental role of mathematics in all science and technology fields. Clear evidence of this is the continued and generous donation our department has received in the past three years from the TUYF Charitable Trust, a trust that has a truly admirable and persistent mission to promote and support fundamental mathematics.’ Professor ZOU continued.

Prior to joining CUHK in 1995, Professor Zou worked in the University of California at Los Angeles as a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor in computational and applied mathematics. He was also an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Germany and a Visiting Scholar in the Technical University of Munich from 1991 to 1993. Professor Zou was made the Chang Jiang Chair Professor by the Ministry of Education of China and is currently the Vice President of the Hong Kong Mathematical Society and President of the East Asia Section of the Inverse Problems International Association. He has over 160 research publications in top-ranked mathematical journals and has been listed in the Highly Cited Mathematicians by Web of Science for 18 years consecutively. Currently, he serves as an associate editor of 12 international mathematical journals, including the three most influential computational mathematics journals SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and ESAIM: Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Analysis.