The Robert Calderbank and Ingrid Daubechies Visiting Scholars program brings mathematicians to build multi-dimensional relationships with Duke Mathematics. Each Visiting Scholar is invited to make two one-week visits to Duke Mathematics, over a two-year span. During each visit, a Visiting Scholar is invited to collaborate, discuss, and mingle with our faculty and students. They are also invited to give one or more talks in the styles of their choice, such as: a public lecture, a specialized research seminar, a department-wide colloquium, a talk about math education, a discussion about community, a guest lecture or mini-course as part of a graduate or undergraduate course. By design, the pacing and flexibility of these visits encourages the development of long-lasting, personalized interactions and collaborations. This program is named in honor of our colleagues Robert Calderbank and Ingrid Daubechies, in appreciation of their vision for mathematical discovery as a community enterprise with room for everyone to join in.
Funding is provided by the Dean of Trinity College and the Provost of Duke University, and administrative support is provided by The Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke.
About the Eponyms
The Organization of Robert Calderbank and Ingrid Daubechies Scholars (ORCID Scholars) is named in honor of our colleagues Robert and Ingrid, in appreciation of their vision for mathematical discovery as a community enterprise with room for everyone to join in.
Robert Calderbank is the Charles S. Sydnor Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor of Mathematics, and Director of the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke. Ingrid Daubechies is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke.
Scholars
Richard Allen
Senior Director at Pfizer Inc.
ORCID Scholar 2025-2027
Richard Allen is a Senior Director at Pfizer, where he leads a group applying mechanistic modeling of physiology to answer questions relating to the development of novel therapies. Most recently, he has supported work in obesity, type 2 diabetes, chronic inflammatory conditions, and covid-19. Aside from the development of new mathematical biology models, his research interests include exploring parameter uncertainty and disease heterogeneity with virtual populations. For his contributions to mathematics in industry, Richard was recently awarded the SIAM Industry Prize at the 2025 annual SIAM meeting.
Prior to joining Pfizer in 2012, Richard did his postdoc at UNC with Tim Elston where he worked on image analysis and cell migration. He received his Ph.D. from University College London where he studied how endothelial cells sense and respond to fluid flow.
Ellen Eischen
Professor of Mathematics, University of Oregon
ORCID Scholar 2023-2025
Ellen Eischen is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon. While she has broad interests, her research especially focuses on number theory. She also enjoys connecting with people and communicating about math, for example by employing skills from her training in improvisational theater. She has created workshops to train faculty and students in principles of improvisation for engaging with broader audiences, organized the Creativity Counts exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art to share a creative side of math with the broader public, and developed the APAW workshop to facilitate diverse research collaborations. The impact of her museum-focused work continues both through her service on the Advisory Board of the newly forming Seattle Universal Math Museum and through the online version of Creativity Counts, which quickly became the JSMA’s most visited virtual exhibit. In recognition of some of her contributions, she was recently named a Fellow of the AWM. Support for her activities has included an NSF CAREER Award, several other NSF research grants, and the Williams Fund.
Ronny Hadani
Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of Texas at Austin
ORCID Scholar 2023-2025
Ronny Hadani is an associate professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Texas at Austin. He is a co-inventor of the OTFS modulation technique and is a co-founder of Cohere Technologies, a company pioneering OTFS based communication technologies. Hadani holds a PhD in pure mathematics from Tel-Aviv University and a Master degree in applied mathematics from The Weizmann Institute of Science.
Daniel Kráľ
Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Discrete Mathematics, Leipzig University
affiliated member, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
ORCID Scholar 2026-2027
Dan Kráľ is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Discrete Mathematics at Leipzig University and an affiliated member of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. He is also an honorary professor at the University of Warwick. His research, which was supported by two ERC grants and many national grants, spans various topics in mathematics, computer science and at their interface, primarily focusing on structural and extremal graph theory, discrete algorithms and combinatorial limits. His results include a solution of Lovász-Plummer Conjecture on matchings and Steinberg’s Conjecture on coloring of planar graphs; both were listed among 100 significant open problems in the second edition of the book Graph Theory by Bondy and Murty (seventeen years after the publication of the book, only 5 of these 100 problems have been fully resolved). Dan Kráľ is a keen supporter of diamond open access publishing – he was one of the two founding managing editors of Advances in Combinatorics, which has become one of the most prestigious combinatorial journals, and he served on the Advisory Board of the computer science journal TheoretiCS during its launch. In recognition of his research achievements and service to the community, Dan Kráľ was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2020 and a SIAM Fellow in 2024.
Emille Davie Lawrence
Associate Professor, University of San Francisco
ORCID Scholar 2023-2025
Emille Davie Lawrence is Senior Director for the Black Achievement Success and Engagement initiative and associate professor at the University of San Francisco. She earned her B.S. in mathematics from Spelman College and her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Georgia. She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an Assistant Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research focuses on topological properties of spatial graphs. She has been recognized for her work in the mathematics community as the 2021 Association for Women in Mathematics Service Award winner, as a recipient of the 2021 Karen EDGE Fellowship for mid-career mathematicians, and also as a 2022 MAA Euler Book Prize winner.
Samuel Punshon-Smith
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics at Tulane University
ORCID Scholar
Dr. Samuel Punshon-Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Tulane University. His research explores the interplay of noise and order in complex systems, using tools from stochastic analysis and PDEs to understand chaotic phenomena in fluid dynamics like mixing and turbulence. He is particularly known for his work on Lagrangian chaos, passive scalar mixing, and the behavior of Lyapunov exponents in infinite-dimensional systems.
Dr. Punshon-Smith has received several awards for his work, including a Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER Award. Before joining Tulane, he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and Prager Assistant Professor at Brown University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Chad Topaz
Professor of Complex Systems, Williams College
ORCID Scholar 2023-2025
Chad Topaz is an applied mathematician and data scientist at Williams College, CU–Boulder, and Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity. Chad spent several decades studying complex and nonlinear systems in the natural sciences, including resonant fluid waves, chemical reactions, and biological aggregations. In more recent years, Chad has focused intensively on applying quantitative tools to expose and remedy social injustice. He is also an avid follower of scholarly research in education studies and educational psychology.
Robin Wilson
Professor of Mathematics, Loyola Marymount University
ORCID Scholar 2023-2025
Dr. Robin Wilson is a Professor of Mathematics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He earned his PhD in Mathematics at the University of California, Davis, and prior to Loyola Marymount he served as Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Cal Poly Pomona. Dr. Wilson has held appointments as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Mathematics at UC Santa Barbara, and Visiting Professor positions in Mathematics at Georgetown University and Pomona College. His scholarship includes both research in low-dimensional topology and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dr. Wilson’s work in the scholarship of teaching and learning focuses on issues of equity and access for students of color in the K-12 and undergraduate mathematics classrooms. His mathematics interests in low-dimensional topology focus on problems in knot theory and spatial graph theory.