Named Postdoctoral Fellows

As Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and EECS at UC Berkeley, Elwyn Berlekamp (1940-2019) was famous for his work in coding theory and combinatorial game theory. His passion for mathematical puzzles and problems dated back to his years as an undergraduate student, when he illustrated himself as one of the five top scorers in the notoriously difficult Putnam competition. Dr. Berlekamp was well known for the Welch-Berlekamp and Berlekamp–Massey algorithms, which are used to implement Reed–Solomon error correction. In addition, he co-authored the books Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and Mathematical Go

Dr. Berlekamp was also the recipient of several honors and prizes. In 1991, he received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and in 1993, the Claude E. Shannon Award, and in 1998, a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society. Elwyn Berlekamp was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013.

The Berlekamp Postdoctoral Fellowship was established in 2014 by a group of his friends—colleagues and former students whose lives have been touched by Dr. Berlekamp in many ways.

Shiing-Shen Chern (1911–2004) was an outstanding contributor to research in differential geometry and devised the now named Chern characteristic classes in fibre spaces. He also gave proof of the famous Gauss-Bonnet formula. Chern received an M.S. degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and a doctor of sciences degree from the University of Hamburg (Germany). In 1949, Chern accepted the chair of geometry at the University of Chicago and moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960. He was elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences a year later. After his retirement from UC Berkeley, Chern was one of the three founders of MSRI and acted as its first director (1981–84). He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the Wolf Prize in 1983.

Johnson Cha served on MSRI’s Board of Trustees from 2000 to 2004. During this time, Mr. Cha created a fund to support Chinese scholars during their stay at MSRI. Mr. Cha is Managing Director of the Mingly Corporation, a Hong Kong investment company focused on building technology companies in the Silicon Valley and the Asia Pacific region, especially China. Mr. Cha holds a BS in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

Stephen Della Pietra received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton University in 1981, and his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1986. From 1987 to 1988, he was a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin. From 1988 to 1989, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

From 1989 to 1995, he was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and Hawthorne, New York. As a project leader of the natural language understanding group, his primary research focused on machine translation and natural language understanding. In 1995 he joined Renaissance Technologies, where he currently co-manages the General Research Group and works on statistical methods to model the stock market.

Stephen is co-founder of the Della Pietra Lecture Series at Stony Brook University. This series brings world-renowned scientists to the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, and is intended to bring awareness of recent and impactful discoveries in physics and mathematics to high school, undergraduate and graduate students. Stephen is a board member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, is on the advisory council of the astrophysics department at Princeton University, as treasurer of the National Museum of Mathematics in New York, and is a board member of the nonprofit organization PIVOT.

Vincent Della Pietra received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton University in 1981, and his PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1986. From 1987 to 1988, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. From 1988 to 1989, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

From 1989 to 1995, he was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights and Hawthorne, New York. As a project leader of the natural language understanding group, his primary research focused on machine translation and natural language understanding. In 1995 he joined Renaissance Technologies, where he currently co-manages the General Research Group and works on statistical methods to model the stock market.

Vincent is co-founder of the Della Pietra Lecture Series at Stony Brook University. This series brings world-renowned scientists to the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, and is intended to bring awareness of recent and impactful discoveries in physics and mathematics to high school, undergraduate and graduate students. He also serves as a board member of the nonprofit organization PIVOT.

The Donoho scholarship was established in 2022 by Dr. David Donoho and Dr. Miriam (Miki) Donoho.

David Donoho is best known for coining the term 'compressed sensing' while proposing a method for speeding up signals acquisition and reconstruction that today is used in MRI scanners by GE, Siemens and Philips serving millions of patients yearly. He received an A.B. in Statistics from Princeton summa cum laude, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard University. Dr. Donoho has served on the faculties at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. He has also worked in industry, in oil exploration (Western Geophysical), information technology (co-founding BigFix, Inc., which was acquired by IBM), and quantitative finance (Renaissance Technologies). Donoho is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the French Académie des Sciences.

Donoho received honorary degrees from the University of Chicago, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, The Technion (Haifa, Israel) and the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario), and has received a MacArthur Fellowship, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies Presidents’ award, and the Norbert Wiener Prize of the American Mathematical Society. In 2013, he received the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences. Donoho was awarded the Gauss Prize at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.

Theodore Gamelin graduated from Yale with a BS in 1960, and obtained his PhD at Berkeley in 1963. After several years spent between MIT and Argentina, Dr. Gamelin joined the UCLA mathematics department in 1968, where his career span 40 years. The main focus of his research has been in the area between functional analysis and complex analysis. He authored several publications including a couple of research monographs on function algebras and a textbook on complex analysis. He also co-authored a textbook on topology with Robert Greene, and a monograph on complex dynamical systems with Lennart Carleson. In the course of his career Dr. Gamelin was a Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Fellow at the Universität des Saarlandes, Germany, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brown University.

Dr. Gamelin became deeply involved in mathematics education in the late 1990s, initially as a math specialist in connection with the California approval process for school math textbooks, and then in 1999 as faculty advisor to the California Mathematics Project, the headquarters of which moved to UCLA. Dr. Gamelin continues to be involved in writing projects for a California nonprofit group (CMAT), whose current focus is on middle school mathematics. He is a primary author of several math textbooks which have gone through the California state approval process.

Dr. Gamelin established the Gamelin Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2014 through a generous endowment gift to MSRI to support and foster young mathematical talents.

Craig Huneke received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1973 and his PhD from Yale University in 1978. Twenty years later he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. Over the years, Dr. Huneke has earned international recognition for his work advancing the field of algebra. He co-invented “tight closure” with Melvin Hochster of the University of Michigan and is highly respected for his expertise in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. He is also recognized for his talent as expositor of mathematics for a general audience as well as for the mathematically sophisticated. Dr. Huneke is also committed to mathematics education and hopes that the Huneke Postdoctoral Fellows will take some interest in issues in mathematics education.

In 2012, Dr. Huneke became the first Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia after serving as the Henry J. Bischoff Professor of Mathematics at the University of Kansas since 1999.

Dusa McDuff received her PhD from Cambridge University in 1971. She has been in the United States since 1978, first as an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University. While at Stony Brook she served as Department Chair and Undergraduate Director, and she has been interested in educational issues at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as being active in encouraging more women to study mathematics. Dr. McDuff joined the faculty at Barnard College in 2007.

Dr. McDuff has worked in symplectic topology since the early 1980s. She has written over 90 papers, as well as co-authored three books with Dietmar Salamon, most recently J-holomorphic curves and Symplectic Topology. McDuff has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, UC Berkeley, MIT, Harvard and, at MSRI (twice) as a mathematician, in addition to serving on MSRI’s Scientific Advisory Committee (1990-98, Chair 1993-96). She has served on the MSRI Board of Trustees (1998-2002 and 2005-present) and she was elected Chair (1998-2001).

Dr. McDuff has been awarded numerous honors including the first Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1991 and honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh (where she was a undergraduate) and the Universities of York and Strasbourg. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in London in 1994 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995; she became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1999.

Roger Strauch is Chairman of The Roda Group, a seed stage venture capital group, based in Berkeley, California. His firm, co-founded in 1997 with Dan Miller, provides entrepreneurs the resources, environment, and guidance to launch and grow their high technology businesses. The Roda Group was the largest investor in Solazyme, a renewable oil and bioproducts company and the leader in algal biotechnology.

In addition, Mr. Strauch is chairman of the board of directors of Cool Systems, the manufacturer of Game Ready, a medical physical therapy system. He was the first CEO and former chairman of Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com).

Mr. Strauch is also a member of the Engineering Dean’s College Advisory Boards of the University of California, Berkeley and Cornell University, and the recipient of the 2002 Wheeler Oak Meritorious Award from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, Mr. Strauch and his wife Dr. Julie Kulhanjian were named and honored as “Builders of Berkeley.”

Karen Uhlenbeck served on the MSRI Board of Trustees from 1981-1990 and again from 2012-2016. She received her PhD from Brandeis University in 1968. Following appointments at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, she has held since 1987 the Sid W. Richardson Foundations Regents Chair III in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2014-2017 she is a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She also served as the vice president of the American Mathematical Society (1987-90).

Dr. Uhlenbeck is a highly distinguished mathematician specializing in differential geometry, nonlinear partial differential equations, and mathematical physics. At the same time, her efforts across the educational spectrum, especially her role as a founder of the Park City-IAS Mathematical Institute, have added vitality to the mathematical scene. Uhlenbeck’s mentoring, both formal (as co-founder of the Annual Women in Mathematics Program at the IAS) and informal, is legendary.

Dr. Uhlenbeck has been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society, the Abel Prize of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the U.S. National Medal of Science. In 1990, she became the second woman (after Emmy Noether in 1932) to present a plenary lecture at an International Congress of Mathematics. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Professor Uhlenbeck is the recipient of seven honorary degrees, most recently from Harvard, Princeton and Brandeis Universities.

Andrew Viterbi served on the MSRI Board of Trustees from April 2001 through February 2013. He is the co-inventor of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) based digital cellular technology. In 2000, Dr. Viterbi retired from his position as vice chairman of the board of Qualcomm, a company he helped found in 1985. He had served as the company’s chief technical officer until 1996, when he became its vice chairman.

Before founding Qualcomm, Dr. Viterbi co-founded Linkabit Corporation, a digital communications company, in 1968. He is the inventor of the Viterbi Algorithm, a decoding algorithm used in most digital communication systems. Dr. Viterbi has spent some of his career in academia as professor in the Schools of Engineering at both UCLA and UC San Diego. Dr. Viterbi is now professor emeritus at UC San Diego.

Dr. Viterbi and his daughter, Dr. Audrey Viterbi, established The Viterbi Group in 2000. The company advises and invests in startup companies, predominantly in the wireless communications and network infrastructure fields. Dr. Viterbi is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and was a member of President Clinton’s Information Technology Advisory Committee. Andrew lives in the San Diego area.