Gigliola Staffilani
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Primary Section: 11, Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2021)
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Biosketch
Gigliola Staffilani is the MIT Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Mathematics. She received the B.S. equivalent from the Universitá di Bologna in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in 1991 and 1995. She had faculty appointments at Stanford, Princeton and Brown, before joining the MIT mathematics faculty in 2002. At Stanford, she received the Harold M. Bacon Memorial Teaching Award in 1997, and was given the Frederick E. Terman Award in 1998. She received a Sloan fellowship in 2000, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1996 and 2003 and a member of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2010.
In 2013 Professor Staffilani was elected member of the Massachusetts Academy of Science and a fellow of the AMS, and in 2014 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 she received a Guggenheim fellowship and a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics. In 2018 she received the Earll M. Murman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising and in 2020 she was selected for the Committed to Caring Award by the MIT Office of Graduate Education. In 2021 she was elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
Gigliola Staffilani is a mathematician who studies dispersive Partial Differential Equations (PDE). These equations, such as the Schrödinger equation, are fundamental in physics and they are proposed as models for a variety of wave phenomena. Staffilani is particularly interested in understanding mathematically how the macroscopic wave solutions of a certain dispersive PDE are derived from the physical interactions of particles involved in the phenomenon that the PDE is supposed to describe. She also studies how the nonlinear interactions between these wave solutions create fascinating objects such as rogue waves, solitons and singularities. In order to analyze in depth these objects she uses a variety of mathematical tools that come from the interaction of harmonic and Fourier analysis, analytic number theory, dynamical systems, probability, geometry and numerical analysis. The interdisciplinary nature of Staffilani’s work has given her the opportunity to collaborate with a large and diverse group of extraordinary researchers who have given her the chance to constantly play with new ideas and constantly keep her sense of discovery fresh and exciting.
