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Awards and Recognition

Leah Edelstein-Keshet is the 2022 SIAM John von Neumann Prize Lecturer

Leah Edelstein-Keshet will deliver this flagship lecture at the 2022 SIAM Annual Meeting, happening July 11- 15, 2022.

The 2022 John von Neumann Prize – the highest honor and flagship lecture of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) – is awarded to Leah Edelstein-Keshet, University of British Columbia, in recognition of her far-reaching contributions to mathematical biology. The talk is happening July 12 at 2:30 p.m. ET. Register for AN22 to attend. Her work on cellular biophysics as well as collective behavior of organisms has had enormous impact in deciphering biological processes. In addition, her book Mathematical Models in Biology is a classic that has been used by students worldwide and laid the foundation for interdisciplinary research in mathematics and life sciences that is flourishing today. Her recent research centers on modeling single and collective cell migration.

Leah Edelstein-Keshet
Leah Edelstein-Keshet

Edelstein-Keshet was a student of Lee A. Segel at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she got her Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1982. Eventually relocating to Vancouver with her young family, she became a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to teach and do research in mathematical biology. Edelstein-Keshet is a SIAM Fellow, has been a SIAM member since 1984, and has served on several SIAM committees. She also served as President of the Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) from 1995-1997. Her previous awards include the Canadian Mathematical Society Krieger-Nelson Prize (2002), the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society Research Award (2016), and the SMB Arthur Winfree Prize (2021). She is enormously grateful to the many students and postdocs who have enriched and contributed to that research over the years.

SIAM awards the John von Neumann Prize annually to an individual for outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematics and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community. It is one of SIAM’s most distinguished prizes.

The John von Neumann Prize Lecture was established in 1959 to honor von Neumann, a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, and computer scientist, whose seminal work helped lead to the founding of modern computing. Learn more about SIAM’s John von Neumann Prize.

Edelstein-Keshet will be awarded the John von Neumann Prize and deliver the associated lecture at the 2022 SIAM Annual Meeting (AN22), happening in a hybrid format (virtual and in-person) July 11 – 15, 2022 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. The talk is happening July 12 at 2:30 p.m. ET. Register for AN22 to attend.