Yun S. Song Named Inaugural Calabi-Simons Professor in Mathematics and Biology
Yun S. Song has been named the inaugural Calabi-Simons Professor in Mathematics and Biology. He will join the faculty on July 1, 2015.
“This important new professorship is an embodiment of the School of Arts and Sciences’ commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and research. We are grateful to the Simons Foundation and to Eugene and Giuliana Calabi for establishing this chair and enabling us to recruit a scholar of Yun Song’s caliber,” said Steven J. Fluharty, Dean, School of Arts and Sciences.
Song was originally trained in mathematics and theoretical physics, but since receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 2001, he has been carrying out interdisciplinary research at the interface between biology and applied mathematics, computer science, and statistics. He is particularly interested in statistical inference problems in population genetics, a branch of evolutionary biology closely related to several areas of mathematics. Song has been on the faculty in the Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley since 2007. His honors and awards include an NIH Pathway to Independence Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, an NSF CAREER Award, Berkeley’s Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and a Miller Research Professorship.
As the Calabi-Simons Professor in Mathematics and Biology at Penn, Song will work to promote the interaction between mathematicians and scholars from other disciplines with research interests in biology. The chair was funded through the Simons Foundation’s Math+X: Encouraging Interactions program, created to encourage novel collaborations between mathematics and other fields in science or engineering. Through a matching gift for endowment, the Math+X program establishes joint chairs, each shared equally between a mathematics department and a partner department. Chair holders are also eligible to apply to the Simons Foundation for additional grants to support activities shared between the two departments.
The Simons Foundation is a private foundation based in New York City, incorporated in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons. The foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences, and it sponsors a range of programs that aim to promote a deeper understanding of our world.
The match for the Simons Foundation’s gift to Penn came from Eugenio and Guiliana Calabi. Eugenio Calabi, Penn's Thomas A. Scott Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, is a visionary mathematician whose work has had profound implications well beyond his own field of complex differential geometry. In the 1950s, Calabi set forth his now-famous "Calabi Conjecture" regarding the structure of certain abstract spaces. His work also has revolutionized theoretical physics by providing the foundation for string theory and is now viewed by many as a model of the universe. Born in Milan, Italy, Calabi earned a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946 and a Master of Arts from the University of Illinois in 1947. He took his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1950 at Princeton University, where he also served as an instructor. He joined Penn’s mathematics department in 1964. Calabi's honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Leroy Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics from the American Mathematical Society, of which he is a fellow. In 2014, Calabi was awarded an honorary doctor of sciences from the University of Pennsylvania.
