Steven Balbus
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Astronomy
Host: Eliot Quataert
E-mail: Steven.Balbus[at]lra.ens.fr
Home Institution: École Normale Supérieure, France
24, rue Lhomond, Laboratoire de Radioastronomie
PARIS CEDEX 05 75231
France

Dr. Balbus is a Professor in the Physics Department in the Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure in Paris, France. He obtained his PhD in physics in 1981 from U.C. Berkeley on the topic of thermal conduction processes in hot astrophysical plasmas. Dr. Balbus has worked on a large variety of problems in astrophysical gasdynamics including the interstellar medium, accretion disks, the intracluster medium, the geodynamo, and stellar interiors. He is best known for work undertaken with Prof. John Hawley (U. Virginia) explaining how laminar flow in accretion disks breaks down into turbulence when even a very weak magnetic field is present, a process thought to be fundamental to much of high energy astrophysics and star formation. Dr. Balbus has also discovered several thermal and viscous instabilities in dilute magnetized plasmas, which endow these gases with significant novel properties. Most recently, he has shown how the bulk of the interior solar rotation profile, as revealed by helioseismology, can be understood via a simple and explicit mathematical solution of the underlying dynamical equations. Dr. Balbus has been awarded a Chaire d'Excellence by the French government (2004) for his research, and was the Spitzer Lecturer in Astrophysics at Princeton University in the Spring of 2011. He serves on the editorial board of Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics.

James Bullock
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Astronomy
Host: Chung-Pei Ma
E-mail: bullock[at]uci.edu
Home Institution: UC Irvine
Physics And Astronomy
2127 Frederick Reines Hall
Irvine, California 92697-2575

James Bullock is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution. His research involves theoretical problems in galaxy evolution and cosmology, and he is particularly interested in the nature of dark matter and the formation of the Milky Way in a cosmological context. He received B.S. degrees in Physics and Mathematics from The Ohio State University in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999. Dr. Bullock is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2008) and was a Hubble Fellow at Harvard Observatory (2003).

Pierre Colmez
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Mathematics
Host: Kenneth Ribet
E-mail: colmez[at]math.jussieu.fr
Home Institution: Institut de Mathématiques, France
équipe De Théorie Des Nombres
4, place Jussieu
Paris F-75005
France

Pierre Colmez is a member of french CNRS, based in University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. He is a number theorist working on L-functions and p-adic problems. In particular he proved a p-adic analog of the classical analytic class number formula. In recent years he has been involved in Fontaine's programm of classification of representations of the absolute Galois group of a p-adic field, and has established the p-adic local Langlands correspondence in dimension 2 for the field of p-adic numbers, by building a bridge from Fontaine's programm to the theory of representations of linear groups.

Robert Griffiths
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Statistics
Host: Steven Evans
E-mail: griff[at]stats.ox.ac.uk
Home Institution: University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Statistics
1 South Parks Rd.
Oxford OX1 3TG
United Kingdom

Dr. Griffiths is Professor of Mathematical Genetics at the University of Oxford. His research interests are in applied probability theory and stochastic processes with evolutionary stochastic models in Mathematical Genetics as a major application. His research spans areas in Mathematics, Computation and Biology. He is particularly known for his research on ancestral inference in Gene Trees. The configuration of mutations on DNA sequences provides information about ancestral histories of a sample of sequences. If there is no recombination a unique perfect phylogeny, a gene tree, can be constructed by a graph theoretic technique. The time to the most recent common ancestor and ages of mutations can be computed by an importance sampling technique on ancestral histories, conditional on the gene tree topology. If there is recombination present then ancestral histories are much more complex and are described by a random ancestral recombination graph. Coalescent models back in time describing ancestry are dual processes, in a mathematical and evolutionary sense, to models of how populations evolve forwards in time. His recent research has been in constructing dual processes in models of selection where there are different types of genes. Pure stochastic process research of his that has Mathematical interest is the following. There is a class of characterizations of bivariate distributions with given marginal distributions and eigenfunctions which are known as Lancaster characterizations. These are known for some classical distributions with polynomial eigenvalues, that is for the Normal, Gamma, Poisson and Negative Binomial distributions as well as partial results for Beta distributions. He has worked on analogous stochastic process characterisations. Diffusion processes play a key role as being extreme points of the processes with others in the class subordinated to them.

Stephen Harris
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
E-mail: stephen.j.harris[at]gm.com
Home Institution: GM R&D CENTER
Electro-chemistry And Battery Systems, Ces
Mail Code 480-102-000, 129 RCEL, 30500 Mound Rd
WARREN, Michigan 48090-9055
Phone: 586-986-6553

Stephen J. Harris received his B.S. in Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at Harvard University in 1975. He was a Miller Institute Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1975 to 1977. Since then he has spent his career at the General Motors Research Labs (1977–1998), Ford Research Labs (1998–2007), and back at General Motors Research since 2007. He has worked in the areas of laser diagnostics of combustion, soot formation and aerosol dynamics, chemical vapor deposition of diamond and boron carbide, contact mechanics modeling and prediction of fatigue lifetimes, the microscopic basis for ductile fracture in cast aluminum, and the microscopic basis for Li-ion battery degradation. He has collected videos showing Li batteries studied using various microscale techniques and posted them on www.LithiumBatteryResearch.com.

Additional Terms
Miller Fellow, 1976 - 1977, Chemistry

Cin Ty Lee
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Earth & Planetary Science
Host: Barbara Romanowicz
E-mail: ctlee[at]rice.edu
Home Institution: Rice University
Earth Science
6100 Main Street, MS-126
Houston, Texas 77005

Cin-Ty Lee is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is a petrologist but also uses geochemistry, field geology, geophysics and Earth history to better understand the evolution of Earth’s interior and how it interacts with the atmosphere and biosphere. He received his BA in geology from UC Berkeley in 1996 and then went on to Harvard, where he obtained his PhD in 2001 in geochemistry on the topic of the origin and evolution of continents. He did his post-doctorate at Caltech on the mobility of extra-terrestrially derived platinum group elements across marine sections of the K-T boundary. Although he has continued his interests in studying the origin and evolution of continents, his research interests have broadened since arriving at Rice. He is currently working on magma chamber differentiation and interaction with the crust, the redox evolution of the Earth’s interior, dynamics of the lithosphere/asthenosphere, long-term climate change, and economic geology. His endeavors in transition metal geochemistry have led him to study the origin of copper ore deposits. Lee is a recipient of a Packard fellowship in 2005, the American Geophysical Union’s Kuno award in 2008, the Geochemical Society’s Clarke Medal in 2009, and the Geological Society of America’s Donath Medal in 2009. He is an amateur ornithologist.

Allan MacDonald
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Physics
Host: Ashvin Vishwanath
E-mail: macd[at]physics.utexas.edu
Home Institution: University of Texas - Austin
Physics
1 University Station C1600
Austin, Texas 78712-0264

Allan H. MacDonald received his B.Sc. degree from St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1973 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Toronto in 1974 and 1978 respectively. He was a member of the research staff of the National Research Council of Canada from 1978 to 1987 and has taught at Indiana University (1987-2000) and the University of Texas at Austin (2000-present) where he now holds the Sid W. Richardson Chair in Physics. He has contributed to research on the quantum Hall effect, electronic structure theory, magnetism, and superconductivity, among a variety of other topics. Dr. MacDonald is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and has been awarded the Herzberg Medal (1987) and the Buckley Prize (2007).

David Manolopoulos
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Chemistry
Host: William Miller
E-mail: mano[at]physchem.ox.ac.uk
Home Institution: Oxford University, United Kingdom
Physical And Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory
South Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3QZ
United Kingdom

Dr. Manolopoulos is a Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at Oxford University. He has worked on many different aspects of chemical dynamics, ranging from the exact quantum mechanical description of chemical reactions in the gas phase to the approximate inclusion of quantum mechanical zero point energy and tunneling effects in simulations of liquids. Most of his current research is in this latter area, and is focused on the development of efficient new imaginary time path integral techniques for studying the thermodynamic, structural and dynamical properties of condensed phase systems. The scope for applications of these techniques is enormous, because quantum mechanical effects in the atomic motion are expected to have a significant influence on the behavior of essentially all systems containing hydrogen atoms at room temperature and below. This includes the majority of systems of interest in chemistry and biochemistry and a significant fraction of the systems of interest in materials science.

Lisa Randall
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
Physics
Host: Lawrence J. Hall
E-mail: randall[at]physics.harvard.edu
Home Institution: Harvard University
Physics
17 Oxford Street, Jefferson 461
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Mario Szegedy
Visiting Miller Professor, 2011 - 2012
EECS
Host: Umesh Vazirani
E-mail: szegedy[at]cs.rutgers.edu
Home Institution: Rutgers University
Computer Science
110 Frelinghuysen Road
Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8019