Athanassios Fokas#
| Membership Number: | 6461 |
| Membership type: | ORDINARY |
| Section: | MATHEMATICS |
| Affiliated section(s): | PHYSICS & ENGINEERING SCIENCES |
| Elected: | 2023 |
| Main Country of Residence: | UNITED KINGDOM |
| Homepage(s): | http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tf227/ |
| ORCID: | 0000-0002-5881-802X |
Present and Previous Positions
- 2002 Elected to the inaugural Chair of Nonlinear Mathematical Science at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge. In January 2021 he became Professor Emeritus and was appointed Director of the 'Legendary Programme in Mathematics' in the University of Cambridge
- 1995 Elected to a Chair in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College
- 1981 Appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Clarkson University, USA. Promoted in 1986 to Professor and Chairman, a position held until 1993, when appointed to a Chair in Mathematical Sciences in Loughborough University, UK
- 2015 Appointed Adjunct Professor of the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Southern California, USA, for a period of four years. Appointed in 2019 Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California, USA, for a period of five years
- Visiting Professor at the University of Stanford for the academic year 1986 - 1987 where he collaborated with J. B. Keller, and at Harvard University in the autumn of 2012 where he taught a course on the Unified Transform (now known as the Fokas method)
Fields of Scholarship
- Applications in medicine and biology
- Electro-magneto-enchephalography
- Integrable systems
- Boundary value problems of linear and integrable nonlinear PDEs
- Asymptotic analysis
- Functional medical imaging
- Painleve equations, orthogonal polynomials and random matrices
Honours and Awards
- 2023 Blaise Pascall Medal
- 2021 Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
- 2019 Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (only a handful of mathematicians are fellows of this prestigious College)
- 2018 - 2005 awarded Honorary Degrees from eight different universities
- 2015 Senior Fellowship from EPSRC,UK, which covered fully his salary at the University of Cambridge for six years (he was released from all teaching and administrative responsibilities and concentrated only on research).
- 2010 Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences
- 2009 Fellowship of the Guggenheim Foundation, USA
- 2006 Excellence Prize of the Bodossaki Foundation (considered the premier scientific prize in Greece) awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic, jointly with Dimitris Christodoulou
- 2005 Awarded funds from the European Community to support one of only ten Chairs of Excellence awarded that year ( to support George Dassios to co-investigate the electromagnetic activity of the brain).
- 2005 Order of Phoenix by the President of the Hellenic Republic (annually, only 15 people are honored)
- 2004 Full member of the Academy of Athens (this is the National Academy of Greece consisting of about 45 members; only six mathematicians have been elected in the Academy, the first was Constantine Caratheodory)
- 2004 Aristeion Prize of the Academy of Athens (the most prestigious Prize of the Academy given every four years to a single scholar chosen from science, or engineering, or medicine)
- 2000 Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society (the most prestigious Prize in UK in applied mathematics and mathematical physics; in 1999 it was awarded to S Hawking and earlier to Sir Roger Penrose)
- 1984 John Graham Faculty Research award
- 1979 - 1980 Honored at the Department of Applied Mathematics of California Institute of Technology with the prestigious Saul Kaplun Fellowship
- 1975 Governors Prize of Imperial College ( best student in Aeronautics).
