Professor Gunther Uhlmann, the Excellence in Teaching Endowed Chair in Mathematics at UCI, has won the 2011 Ralph E. Kleinman Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The Kleinman Prize is awarded biennially to an individual for outstanding research, or other contributions, that bridges the gap between mathematics and applications, particularly work that uses high-level mathematics and/or invents new mathematical tools to solve applied problems from engineering, science, and technology. Professor Uhlmann is being recognized for his "insightful and deep contributions to the theory of inverse problems." In particular, the committee noted that "His work is distinguished by its mathematical beauty and relevance to important inverse problems in medical imaging and seismic prospecting." The award will be presented to him at the 2011 ICIAM Meeting, which will be held July 18-22, 2011 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
 
Professor Uhlmann received his PhD in Mathematics from MIT in 1976. He has had postdoctoral appointments at Harvard, MIT and the Courant Institute at NYU. He has received several honors and awards including a Sloan Fellowship in 1984 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. In 2004, the Institute of Scientific Information named him as a Highly Cited Researcher. He was elected to be a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2010, for his contributions to the analysis of inverse problems and partial differential equations and was named as one of six Senior Scholars for 2010-2011 by the Clay Institute. He was also the recipient of the MSRI / UC Berkeley Chancellor's Award. Chancellor's Scholarships are awarded to top researchers who are also known for their excellent teaching credentials. Professor Uhlmann was part of the MSRI program in Inverse Problems in Fall 2010.
 
Most recently, he received the Bôcher Memorial Prize by American Mathematical Society (AMS) in January 2011 for his fundamental work on inverse problems, his incisive work on boundary rigidity and nonuniqueness (also known as cloaking). Presented every three years by the American Mathematical Society, the Bôcher Prize recognizes an outstanding research paper in the field of mathematical analysis that has appeared in the preceding six years. Also in January, Professor Uhlmann was invited to present the 6th AMS Einstein Public Lecture in Mathematics, which will be held at the George Washington University campus, in Washington D.C., on Saturday, March 17, 2012. The AMS Einstein Public Lecture is given annually at one of the Society's eight sectional meetings. The lectures began in 2005, to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of Einstein's annus mirabilis, the year 1905, which marked the publication of three fundamental papers by Albert Einstein that changed the course of twentieth-century physics.
 
Professor Uhlmann has given numerous prestigious plenary and guest lectures and was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin and a Plenary Lecturer at the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Zurich, Switzerland. He has organized many conferences and workshops at the national and international level and served on many important committees in the mathematics community. His publication list has more than 150 refereed papers in top journals in mathematics and other fields. Prior to joining UCI he was the Walker Family Endowed Professor in Mathematics at the University of Washington. Professor Uhlmann's research focuses on inverse problems, microlocal analysis and partial differential equations.