Leverhulme Trust awards prestigious visiting professorship to Maths Department

Leverhulme Trust visiting professorship grant to Professor Grigorios Pavliotis and Professor Tony Lelièvre (visiting fellow to Abraham de Moivre IRL)

Professor Grigorios Pavliotis, Head of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics section at the Department of Mathematics, Imperial and Professor Tony Lelievre, visiting fellow from École des Ponts ParisTech to the CNRS – Imperial Abraham de Moivre International Lab have received a prestigious visiting professorship grant from the Leverhulme Trust. The grant enables Professor Lelievre to extend his stay at the Department of Mathematics, Imperial by six months.

The objective of Professor Lelievre’s visit is to disseminate recent advances in the mathematical analysis of metastable stochastic processes and related sampling algorithms, to launch collaborative research projects on those subjects with scientists in the UK, and to explore new research directions at the interface between sampling techniques, optimisation and machine learning algorithms. He will contribute to the activity of the Department of Mathematics through lectures, seminars, and interactions with researchers, in particular from the Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics section. A substantial part of his stay will be devoted to specific interactions with young researchers (PhDs and postdocs), in particular through a series of Leverhulme Lectures. 

Professor Pavliotis and Professor Lelievre organised a very successful workshop on Interacting Particle Systems and applications that included nine talks from experts over two days in December 2019. Interacting particle systems are used in many contexts, for modeling purposes (collective behaviour, mean field games, statistical physics) or in numerical methods (optimization, sampling methods, simulation of rare events). The workshop, supported by the CNRS-Imperial Abraham de Moivre International Lab, enabled them to gather mathematicians working on different aspects of these subjects: algorithms, models and mathematical analysis.

About Professor Tony Lelievre
Tony Lelievre is a world leader in the mathematical analysis of stochastic numerical methods, and their applications to molecular dynamics simulations, in particular. Among his achievements are new mathematical frameworks and algorithms for sampling multimodal measures, for sampling metastable stochastic trajectories, and for coarse-graining high dimensional problems. In terms of mathematical advances, his contributions lie at the interface between probability theory and the analysis of partial differential equations.