Björn Birnir

Björn Birnir

Björn Birnir
University Of California, Santa Barbara US

Professor Björn Birnir did his doctoral work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, at New York University, on the Korteweg-de Vries equation that describes shallow water waves. He was supervised by Henry P. McKean, at the Courant Institute, and as a postdoc by Jerrold Marsden at UC Berkely. Professor Birnir has been a professor at UC Santa Barbara since 1993, where he began his employment in 1984. Since 2006 he has held visiting professorships at the University of Iceland, University of Granada, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ZiF (Center for Interdisiplinary Research) in Bielefeld, Germany and the Courant Institute. He is a member of the editorial boards of various international journals and the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulations, published by the publishing house De Gruyter in Berlin, Germany. Among other distinctions he is a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (the organization that publishes the journal Science) and has occupied important positions at UC Santa Barbara as well in the UC system as a whole (among the latter are, UC Graduate Council Coordinating Committee, UC Council on Budget and Planning Committee, UC Council of International Education, UC Education Abroad Program Governing Board). He was the Director of the UC Education Abroad Program in Spain, 2009-2011. His most recent award was the Technical Achievement Award, ICNPAA Conference, Norway, July 2014.

Research stay at UC3M: DEPARTMENT OF MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING AND CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Project:  Scientifically, Professor Birnir is an expert on dynamical systems both deterministic and stochastic. He has been the Director of the Center for Complex and Nonlinear Science since 1998. As is clear from his list of publication, in addition to his work on nonlinear partial differential equations and dynamical systems, he has made several scientific contributions in collaborations with experimental groups in condensed matter physics, on quantum wells and infrared detectors (working with the free-electron laser and terahertz spectroscopy laboratory of Mark Sherwin), in engineering (turbulence, fluid flow), geophysics (earthquakes, erosion in fluvial landscapes), ecology (synchronized motion of schools of fish) and cell biology (populations of bacteria).

Stay period: JAN 2015 - JUN 2015