The new Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation at the University of Chicago comprises a collaborative group of mathematicians and statisticians from UChicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who seek to bring powerful mathematical ideas to bear on key contemporary scientific and technological challenges. IMSI is funded with a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Researchers at IMSI will build a platform that accelerates the translation of applied mathematical and statistical techniques into solutions for urgent scientific and societal problems. Many of these problems arise naturally in a range of fields already being studied across the four partner institutions, including climate change, health care, quantum information theory, artificial intelligence, data science, economics and materials science.
The current complex environment of science and engineering research involves a deep interaction of multiple disciplines to address scientific problems. These interactions, which are often at very large scales, need sophisticated mathematical and statistical approaches that underpin solutions to the scientific problems. While enabling these applied mathematical approaches, IMSI will benefit from the institutional strengths of each of its university partners, both in the mathematical sciences as well as in the particular application areas of science, technology, economics and policy, drawing from the deep programmatic expertise of a network of centers and research groups.
“The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation will be a critical national resource for applied mathematics, purposefully connecting mathematical and statistical methods and discoveries to applied science and technology in a way that reaches across disciplines and brings together a wide range of collaborators to address some of the most challenging problems of our time,” said Robert J. Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago. “We are excited to launch the Institute at the University of Chicago and look forward to seeing the impact of its work in the years ahead.”
Read more at UChicago News.
Photo by Robert Kozloff.