Group Honors Risk Analysis Center Director

UT Dallas School of Management Professor Alain Bensoussan has been named one of the charter fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the world’s leading applied mathematics society.

Dr. Bensoussan, distinguished research professor and director of the School of Management’s International Center for Decision and Risk Analysis, is one of 183 members of the inaugural class of the SIAM Fellows Program. The fellowship program recognizes distinguished representatives in academia, government and industry for their contributions to the fields of applied math and computational science.

Eight of the honorees are from Texas: four from UT Austin, two from Rice University, one from the University of Houston and one from UT Dallas.

“The announcement of the first class of SIAM Fellows is an important milestone for the applied mathematics and computational science community,” said SIAM President Douglas Arnold. “Advancing the frontiers of research in branches of mathematics as distinct as number theory and partial differential equations, these professionals have applied their work to endeavors ranging from mining to medicine. … Their contributions are truly outstanding.”

The honor recognizes Bensoussan for his major contributions to the field of control theory, particularly stochastic control. Bensoussan, who chaired the European Space Agency from 1999 to 2002, currently focuses his research on risk and decision analysis. He joined UT Dallas’ faculty in 2004, coming from the University of Paris-Dauphine. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Paris.

“This new fellowship recognition will be very useful in drawing attention to our community. I am, of course, very honored and happy to be a member of this list since I have been working in this field from the beginning of my career. I am happy also if it helps my university and all my colleagues and students,” Bensoussan said.

Starting in 2010, SIAM anticipates the number of fellowships granted annually to total around 0.3 percent of the organization’s entire membership (12,000). SIAM is an international organization that strives to build cooperation between mathematics, science and technology through its publications, research and community. The organization will honor the new fellows on July 7 during the SIAM Annual Meeting in Denver. The complete list of 2009 SIAM Fellows can be found at http://fellows.siam.org.