2025 MPS Annual Meeting

Ruth Baker
University of Oxford

What Is Parameter Identifiability, Why Do We Need Identifiable Models, and What Can Identifiable Models Tell Us About Regulation of the Cell Cycle?

Mathematical modelling is increasingly integral to the interpretation of experimental data across applied mathematics, particularly in the life sciences where complex dynamical systems are prevalent. Accurate parameter estimation is central to this endeavor: model parameters are used not only to fit observed data but also to infer latent biological processes and generate predictive simulations. A fundamental issue is parameter identifiability—the extent to which model parameters can be uniquely or reliably estimated given the available data. This becomes especially challenging in the context of nonlinear, high-dimensional models that are common in systems biology because many existing identifiability tools are either underutilized or not well-adapted to such models. In this talk, I will outline recent progress in developing methods to assess parameter identifiability. I will illustrate these approaches using models of cell cycle regulation and demonstrate how identifiability analysis can shed light on the influence of regulatory mechanisms on collective cell migration.

Ruth E. Baker is a professor of applied mathematics and an affiliated principal investigator at the Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Oxford. She holds a D.Phil. in mathematics from Oxford and has developed a research program at the interface of applied mathematics, statistical inference, and the life sciences. Her work focuses on the development of mathematical and computational tools to extract biological insights from complex models and data, with particular emphasis on parameter identifiability and the integration of models with experimental observations. Her contributions have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Beyond her research, she plays a leading role in the international mathematical biology community, having served on the Board of Directors of the Society for Mathematical Biology and currently chairing the SIAM Life Sciences Activity Group.
 

Emanuele Berti
Johns Hopkins University

Black Hole Demography and Black Hole Spectroscopy with Gravitational Waves

As the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational-wave detector network improves in sensitivity, observations of binary black hole mergers are growing in number and quality. With each new observation, we are building a census of black hole masses, spins, and redshifts. In the first part of their talk, Emanuele Berti will discuss our current understanding of the population of astrophysical black holes and of their formation channels, and how future detectors (the Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer, and the space-based interferometer LISA) will extend this “black hole demography” program to a whole new mass and redshift range.

Gravitational-wave observations are also testing general relativity in the strong gravity regime. According to Einstein’s theory, as the remnant of a binary black hole merger settles to the stationary, rotating solution found by Roy Kerr, it emits characteristic “ringdown” waves—a superposition of damped exponentials with frequencies and damping times that depend only on the mass and spin of the black hole. In the second part of their talk, Berti will explain how these measurements can be used to do “black hole spectroscopy” and provide direct evidence of black holes, just like the 21-cm line identifies interstellar hydrogen.

Emanuele Berti’s research focuses on black holes, neutron stars, gravitational-wave astronomy, and tests of general relativity. After his Ph.D. from the University of Rome, he held postdoctoral positions at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Washington University in Saint Louis, and JPL/Caltech. He joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2009, and he moved to Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Berti served as chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Gravitational Physics and as president of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. His research has been supported by awards from the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Templeton Foundation, and the Simons Foundation.
 

Ivan Corwin
Columbia University

Extreme Diffusion

Two hundred years ago, Robert Brown observed the statistics of the motion of grains of pollen in water. It took almost one hundred years for Einstein and others to develop an effective theory describing this motion as that of a random walker. In this talk, Ivan Corwin challenges a key implication of this well-established theory. When studying systems with very large numbers of particles diffusing together, Corwin will argue that the Einstein random walk theory breaks down when it comes to predicting the statistical behavior of extreme particles—those that move the fastest and furthest in the system. In its place, Ivan will describe a new theory of extreme diffusion which captures the effect of the hidden environment in which particles diffuse together and allows us to interrogate that environment by studying extreme particles. He will highlight one piece of mathematics that led us to develop this theory—a non-commutative binomial theorem—and hint at other connections to integrable probability, quantum integrable systems and stochastic PDEs.

Ivan Corwin is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University. Prior to arriving there in 2013, he did a postdoc at MIT and Microsoft Research and received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the Courant Institute. His research is at the interface of probability, integrable systems, and mathematical physics. He is currently a Simons Investigator in mathematics, a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics; has held fellowships or chairs from the Simons Foundation, Packard Foundation, Clay Mathematics Institute, Institut Henri Poincaré, and Miller Institute; and is a recipient of the Loève prize, Alexanderson award, Rollo Davidson prize, and a Blavatnik National Award finalist.
 

Zaher Hani
University of Michigan

Hilbert’s Sixth Problem: From Particles to Waves

In his sixth problem, Hilbert called for the derivation of the equations of fluid mechanics—such as the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations—by way of rigorously justifying Boltzmann’s kinetic theory for particle systems. The scope of this program, now known as Hilbert’s program, was precisely framed in the mid-20th century through the works of Grad and Cercignani, who identified the correct limiting process involved: the Boltzmann-Grad limit. In his celebrated work, Lanford (1975) gave the first rigorous derivation of Boltzmann’s equations, albeit only valid for short times. However, Hilbert’s sixth problem requires a long-time extension of Lanford’s result, which remained open for decades. In recent joint work with Yu Deng (University of Chicago) and Xiao Ma (University of Michigan), we extend Lanford’s theorem to long times—specifically for as long as the solution of Boltzmann’s equation exists. This allows for the full execution of Hilbert’s program and the derivation of the fluid equations in the Boltzmann-Grad limit. The underlying strategy follows an earlier joint work with Yu Deng that resolved a parallel problem, in which colliding particles are replaced by nonlinear waves; thus, establishing the mathematical foundations of wave turbulence theory. In this talk, we will review this progress and discuss some future directions.

Zaher Hani is the Frederick W. and Lois B. Gehring Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works in the field of nonlinear PDE and mathematical physics. Before moving to Michigan in 2018, Hani held positions at Georgia Tech (2014-2018), and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU (2011-2014). He graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011 under the supervision of Terence Tao.
 

Hee Oh
Yale University

A Traveler’s Journey in a Hyperbolic World

In this lecture, we will explore the journey of a traveler moving along a straight (Euclidean) path in a variety of geometric worlds. In a Euclidean torus world, she enjoys the sights of a subtorus, a phenomenon explained by Kronecker’s 1884 theorem showing that the closure of any line in the Euclidean torus is always a subtorus. But what happens when she ventures into closed hyperbolic manifolds or even hyperbolic manifolds of infinite volume? We will describe what she encounters, accompanied by numerous illustrations to bring these geometric concepts to life.

Hee Oh is the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Her work bridges dynamics, Lie groups, geometry, and number theory, showing how symmetry and motion of shapes in curved spaces uncovers hidden patterns—even when those spaces stretch out endlessly. After earning her Ph.D. from Yale in 1997, she held faculty appointments at Princeton, Caltech, and Brown before returning to Yale in 2013. Her contributions have been recognized with the AMS Satter Prize (2015), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), the Ho-Am Prize in Science (2018), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024). She previously served as a vice president of the American Mathematical Society.
 

Amit Singer
Princeton University

Mathematics of Cryo-Electron Microscopy

Single particle cryo-EM is an increasingly popular technique for determining 3-D molecular structures at high resolution. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three of the pioneers of cryo-EM, and already in the early stages of the global pandemic, cryo-EM was successfully applied to image the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. We will discuss the mathematical principles and computational methods for reconstruction using cryo-EM, focusing on the challenges of reconstructing small size molecules and the reconstruction of flexible molecules.

Amit Singer is a professor of mathematics, the director of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (PACM), and a member of the Executive Committee for the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) at Princeton University. He joined Princeton as an assistant professor in 2008. From 2005 to 2008, he was a Gibbs Assistant Professor in Applied Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics, Yale University. Singer received the B.Sc. degree in physics and mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Tel Aviv University (Israel), in 1997 and 2005, respectively. His list of awards includes a SIAM Fellowship (2022), Simons Math+X Investigator Award (2017), National Finalist Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists (2016), Moore Investigator in Data-Driven Discovery (2014), Simons Investigator Award (2012), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2010), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2010), and the Haim Nessyahu Prize for Best Ph.D. in Mathematics in Israel (2007). His current research in applied mathematics focuses on theoretical and computational aspects of data science, and on developing computational methods for structural biology.
 

John Voight
University of Sydney

Ranks of Elliptic Curves

Elliptic curves lie at the intersection of many areas of mathematics and remain central to modern number theory. The rank of an elliptic curve over the rational numbers measures the size of its group of rational points; intuitively, it counts the number of independent points needed to generate all rational solutions up to torsion. A fundamental question, going back to Poincaré, remains unresolved: can the rank be arbitrarily large? In this talk, we present computations and data, a statistical model and heuristic framework to guide our expectations, and outliers that challenge these assumptions. This is joint work with Jennifer Park, Bjorn Poonen, and Melanie Matchett Wood.

John Voight is professor of mathematics at the University of Sydney, where he leads the Magma Computational Algebra group and works in arithmetic geometry. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and then held faculty positions at the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and in 2025 was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Voight’s research aims to make structures in algebra and number theory explicit. Motivated by the Langlands program, he develops algorithms that bring abstract objects—such as modular forms, elliptic curves, Galois representations, and L-functions—within computational reach. His work enables large-scale computations and new experimental approaches in number theory, with a view to solve concrete problems as well as reveal patterns and conjectures that illuminate the landscape of modern arithmetic.
 

Norman Yao
Harvard University

A Universal Theory of Spin Squeezed Entanglement

Quantum metrology makes use of structured entanglement to perform measurements with greater precision than would be possible with only classically correlated particles. One of the most paradigmatic examples of such entanglement is known as “spin squeezing”, which is known to arise in bespoke systems exhibiting all-to-all interactions. In this talk, Norman Yao will provide evidence for the following conjecture: that there exists a one-to-one correspondence between spin squeezing and a particular type of magnetic order (i.e. an easy-plane ferromagnet). If true, this would suggest that spin squeezed entanglement can naturally be generated in a wide variety of physical systems, including quantum dipoles.

Norman Yao is Professor of Physics at Harvard University. His research interests lie at the interface between AMO physics, condensed matter, and quantum information science. A recurring theme in his research program is that much of the power of quantum mechanics remains concealed if one focuses solely on systems in thermal equilibrium. Norm earned both his undergraduate degree (2009) and his Ph.D. (2014) from Harvard. Following a Miller postdoctoral fellowship, he joined the UC Berkeley physics faculty in 2017 and returned to Harvard in 2022. He is a recipient of the Breakthrough Foundation’s New Horizons Prize, a Simons Investigator (2023-2028), a Brown Investigator and has been awarded the I. I. Rabi Prize and the George E. Valley Prize from the American Physical Society.

The Simons Foundation will coordinate travel and hotel accommodations for all in-person participants. In-person participants and speakers are expected to attend all meeting days. Participants wishing to arrive on Friday, October 17 are asked to attend remotely.

The Simons Foundation will never ask for credit card information or require payment for registration to our events.

Air and Rail

The foundation will arrange and pay for round-trip travel from their home city to NYC within the below parameters. All travel and hotel arrangements must be booked through the Simons Foundation’s preferred travel agency.

Travel Booking Policy
Economy Class: For flights that are three hours or less to your destination, the maximum allowable class of service is Economy class.
Premium Economy Class: For flights where the total air travel time (excluding connection time) is more than three hours and less than seven hours per segment to your destination, the maximum allowable class of service is premium economy.
Business Class: When traveling internationally (or to Hawaii/Alaska) travelers are permitted to travel in Business Class on those segments that are seven hours or more. If the routing is over budget, a premium economy or mixed-class ticket will be booked.
Amtrak Acela service (when available) will be booked for all individuals requesting train travel via the Northeast Corridor.

Travel Deviations

The following travel specifications are considered deviations and will only be accommodated if the cost is less than or equal to the amount the Simons Foundation would pay for a standard round-trip ticket from your home city to the conference city:

• Preferred airline
• Preferred travel class
• Specific flights/flight times
• Travel dates outside those associated with the conference
• Arriving or departing from an airport other than your home city or conference city airports, i.e. multi-segment or triangle trips.

All deviations must be reviewed and approved by the Simons Foundation and, if the cost is more than what would normally be paid, a reimbursement quote must be obtained through the foundation’s travel agency before proceeding to booking and paying for travel out of pocket. All reimbursements for travel booked directly will be paid after the conclusion of the meeting.

Changes After Ticketing

All costs related to changes made to ticketed travel are to be paid for by the participant and are not reimbursable. Please contact the foundation’s travel agency for further assistance.

Personal & Rental Cars

Personal car and rental trips over 250 miles each way require prior approval from the Simons Foundation via email.

Rental cars must be pre-approved by the Simons Foundation.

The Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel offers valet parking. Please note there are no in-and-out privileges when using the hotel’s garage, therefore it is encouraged that participants walk or take public transportation to the Simons Foundation.

Hotel

Individuals who require hotel accommodations are hosted by the foundation for a maximum of 3 nights at the Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel, arriving on Wednesday, October 15 and departing on Saturday, October 18.

Any additional nights are at the attendee’s own expense. To arrange accommodations, please register at the link included in your invitation.

Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel
112 W 25th St
New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 206-1522
https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/nycmm-renaissance-new-york-chelsea-hotel/overview/

For driving directions to the Renaissance New York Chelsea Hotel, please click here.

Overview

In-person participants will be reimbursed for meals and local expenses including ground transportation. Expenses should be submitted through the foundation’s online expense reimbursement platform after the meeting’s conclusion.

Expenses accrued because of meetings not directly related to the Simons Foundation-hosted meeting (a satellite meeting or meeting held at another institution, for example) will not be reimbursed by the Simons Foundation and should be paid by other sources.

Below are key reimbursement takeaways; a full policy will be provided with the final logistics email circulated approximately 2 weeks prior to the meeting’s start.

Meals

The daily meal limit is $125; itemized receipts are required for expenses over $24 USD. The foundation DOES NOT provide a meal per diem and only reimburses actual meal expenses up the following amounts.

• Breakfast $20
• Lunch $30
• Dinner $75

Allowable Meal Expenses

• Meals taken on travel days (when you traveled by air or train).
• Meals not provided on a meeting day, dinner on Friday for example.
• Group dinners consisting of fellow meeting participants paid by a single person will be reimbursed up to $75 per person and the amount will count towards the $125 daily meal limit.

Unallowable Meal Expenses

• Meals taken outside those provided by the foundation (breakfast, lunch, breaks and/or dinner).
• Meals taken on days not associated with Simons Foundation-coordinated events.
• Minibar expenses.
• Meal expenses for a non-foundation guest.

• Ubers, Lyfts, taxis, etc., taken to and from restaurants in Manhattan.

  • Accommodations will be made for those with mobility restrictions.

Ground Transportation

Expenses for ground transportation will be reimbursed for travel days (i.e. traveling to/from the airport or train station) as well as subway and bus fares while in Manhattan are reimbursable.

Transportation to/from satellite meetings are not reimbursable.

Attendance

In-person participants and speakers are expected to attend all meeting days. Participants receiving hotel and travel support wishing to arrive on meeting days which conclude at 2:00 PM will be asked to attend remotely.

Entry & Building Access

Upon arrival, guests will be required to show their photo ID to enter the Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute buildings. After checking-in at the meeting reception desk, guests will be able to show their meeting name badge to re-enter the building. If you forget your name badge, you will need to provide your photo ID.

The Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute buildings are not considered “open campuses” and meeting participants will only have access to the spaces in which the meeting will take place. All other areas are off limits without prior approval.

If you require a private space to conduct a phone call or remote meeting, please contact your meeting manager at least 48-hours ahead of time so that they may book a space for you within the foundation’s room reservation system.

Guests & Children

Meeting participants are required to give 24-hour advance notice of any guests meeting them at the Simons Foundation either before or after the meeting. Outside guests are discouraged from joining meeting activities, including meals.

Except for Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute staff, ad hoc meeting participants who did not receive a meeting invitation directly from the Simons Foundation are not permitted.

Children under the age of 18 are not permitted to attend meetings at the Simons Foundation. Furthermore, the Simons Foundation does not provide childcare facilities or support of any kind. Special accommodations will be made for nursing parents.

Meeting & Policy Questions

Meghan Fazzi
Senior Manager, Events & Administration
[email protected]

Travel & Hotel Support

FCM Travel Meetings & Events
[email protected]
Hours: M-F, 8:30 AM-5:00 PM ET
+1-888-789-6639