Biosketch

Emmanuel Candès is the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics, and professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford University. Up until 2009, he was the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests are in applied mathematics, statistics, information theory, signal processing and mathematical optimization with applications to the imaging sciences, scientific computing and inverse problems. Candès graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1993 with a degree in science and engineering, and received his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University in 1998. Emmanuel received the 2006 Alan T. Waterman Award from NSF, which recognizes the achievements of early-career scientists. Other honors include the 2013 Dannie Heineman Prize presented by the Academy of Sciences at Göttingen, the 2010 George Polya Prize awarded by the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the 2015 AMS-SIAM George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research Interests

Emmanuel's work lies at the interface of mathematics, statistics, information theory, signal processing and scientific computing, and is about finding new ways of representing information and of extracting information from complex data. For example, he helped launch the field known as compressed sensing, which is a mathematical technique that has led to advances in the efficiency and accuracy of data collection and analysis, and can be used to significantly speed up MRI scanning times. More broadly, he is interested in theoretical and applied problems characterized by incomplete information. His work combines ideas from probability theory, statistics and mathematical optimization to answer questions such as whether it is possible to recover the phase of a light field from intensity measurements only as in X-ray crystallography; or users' preferences for items from just a few samples as in recommender systems and/or fine details of an object from low-frequency data as in microscopy. His most recent research is concerned with the development of statistical techniques addressing the issue of the irreproducibility of scientific research (the fact that many follow up studies cannot reproduce early findings).

Membership Type

Member

Election Year

2014

Primary Section

Section 32: Applied Mathematical Sciences