Jalal Shatah, Ph.D.

Jalal Shatah is Silver Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, where he has also served as deputy director and chair of the Department of Mathematics. Early in his career, he was honored with a Presidential Young Investigator Award. His research has made foundational contributions to nonlinear partial differential equations, dispersive equations, geometric wave equations, water waves, and wave turbulence. He helped clarify the role of resonance in the long-time behavior of nonlinear waves, including influential work on the nonlinear Klein–Gordon equation. His later work on critical wave equations and geometric PDE broadened his perspective and led to major advances in the study of gravity water waves, including local well-posedness through geometric control of the evolving free surface. He also contributed to the development of the space-time resonance method, now a fundamental tool in the analysis of dispersive equations.

More recently, his work has focused on wave turbulence, where he studies the emergence of collective statistical behavior in nonlinear wave systems through resonance, stochasticity, and energy transfer across scales. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the 2025 Kuwait Prize in Basic Sciences.