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11/16/2006 12:14:00 AM

Purdue’s Bañuelos featured speaker at Nov. 29 diverse scholars lecture

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

The President’s Lecture Series of Diverse Scholars will host a talk by Rodrigo Bañuelos, professor of mathematics from Purdue University, at 4 p.m. Nov. 29.

The lecture, titled “Probability and Some Problems on the Spectral Geometry of Schrödinger Operators and Fractional Laplacians,” will be held in McMurtry Auditorium, Anne and Charles Duncan Hall. It requires no technical knowledge of probability or spectral theory and is designed for a general audience.

The lecture series of diverse scholars was established in 2003 and seeks to build and extend Rice’s commitment to diversity of ideas, experience and viewpoints by bringing some of the finest underrepresented minority scholars in the nation to Rice.

Bañuelos believes in the responsibilities of the scientist/academician beyond the boundary of pure scientific and academic research. He has been active in many efforts, local and national, designed to increase the number of minority students in sciences and engineering. In 2004, he was honored with the Blackwell-Tapia Prize for his career and contributions to encouraging ethnic minority students to study and pursue mathematics careers.

Bañuelos’ research focuses on probability and its connections to harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, spectral theory and geometry. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California–Los Angeles in 1984, spent two years as a Bantrell research fellow at the California Institute of Technology and one year as a National

Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois–Urbana before moving to Purdue in 1987 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1989 and to full professor in 1992.

From 1989 to 1994, Bañuelos was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator. He was elected a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2003. From 1998 to 2002, he served on the Scientific Advisory Council of the Mathematical Science Research Institute at Berkeley. He was a member of the United States National Committee on Mathematics from 1998 to 2001 and is a current board of trustees member for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. He served on the editorial boards of the Annals of Probability from 1991 to 1996 and the Transactions and Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society from 1996 to 2000.

Bañuelos’ lecture is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Engineering, the Office of the Dean of Natural Sciences and the departments of Mathematics, Statistics and Computational and Applied Mathematics.