People

Dimitri (Dima) Shlyakhtenko was appointed Director of IPAM on July 1, 2017. Shlyakhtenko has been a member of the faculty at UCLA department of mathematics since 1998, and served as the department chair from 2012 to 2015. His research is on Operator Algebra and includes free probability theory, random matrix theory, as well as von Neumann algebras and L²-invariants. He received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 1997. He was the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2001 and a Special Project Award from the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2002. The UCLA department of mathematics presented him with the R. Sorgenfrey Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004.  He gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India in 2010.

Christian Ratsch grew up in Berlin, Germany, where he received his undergraduate education at the Technical University. He moved to the United States in 1988, where he completed his PhD in physics at Georgia Tech in 1994. After a short appointment at the Imperial College in London and a two-year post-doc at the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin, Ratsch came to the UCLA Mathematics Department in 1997. He has been at UCLA since then, and joined IPAM as the Associate Director in 2006, and became Deputy Director in 2018. Ratsch’s research interests are mathematical and physical modeling and simulation of problems in materials sciences on all appropriate time and length scales.

His expertise includes density-functional theory (DFT), stochastic, atomistic models (KMC), and continuum type models (level-sets). The research topics of his research group include modeling and simulation of growth of thin films and nanostructures, design and optimization of new hybrid solar cells, and design and optimization of new heterocrystals.

Selenne Bañuelos is an associate professor of mathematics at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, CA. She received her BS in mathematics from UCSB in 2007 and her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Southern California in 2013.  Her research is in mathematical biology. Her recent projects are on a mathematical model of sleep and thermoregulation, and a mathematical model on combination treatment of phage and antibiotics to treat illnesses associated with multi-drug resistant organisms. The latter project began during her participation in the Collaborative Workshop for Women in Math Bio at IPAM. She was the recipient of the MAA Henry L. Alder Award in 2020.  Selenne grew up in Los Angeles, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood.

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Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1975. He has been a professor of mathematics at UCLA since 1999, having completed his PhD under Elias Stein at Princeton in 1996. Tao’s areas of research include harmonic analysis, PDE, combinatorics, and number theory. He has received a number of awards, including the Salem Prize in 2000, the Fields Medal in 2006, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, the Crafoord prize in 2012, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015. Terence Tao also holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2020-2024, he served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Kevin Klowden is the Special Advisor to the IPAM Directorate. He is a dynamic global executive and global strategist with over two decades of experience driving economic innovation, sustainable finance, and strategic policy at the intersection of public, private, and institutional sectors. In his role as an Executive Director at the Milken Institute, he spearheads global financial policy initiatives and cultivate strategic alliances with policymakers, institutional investors, and innovation-driven enterprises to advance inclusive prosperity. Kevin is committed to fostering organizational excellence, market resilience, and building innovation ecosystems that support long-term, equitable growth.