SIAM Announces 2026 Major Prize Recipients
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has announced the 2026 recipients of its major prizes and awards who will be awarded at the SIAM Annual Meeting (AN26), taking place July 6-10, 2026, in Cleveland, OH. Awardees will be recognized during the conference for their research contributions, lifetime achievements, and service to the field. The SIAM Annual Meeting provides a broad view of the state of the art in applied mathematics, computational science, and their applications through these prize lectures as well as invited presentations, minitutorials, minisymposia, contributed presentations, and posters.
SIAM congratulates these eight prize recipients for their hard work, dedication, and impressive contributions, which strengthen and enhance the landscape of applied mathematics, computational science, and data science worldwide. SIAM would also like to thank all the nominators who recognized their colleagues for their accomplishments.
Fioralba Cakoni, Rutgers University, United States
Professor Fioralba Cakoni is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University and is a fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She is on the editorial board of both the SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics and the SIAM Journal of Mathematical Analysis and has recently been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of Inverse Problems. Professor Cakoni is one of the founders and a leading proponent of the qualitative approach to inverse scattering theory which has been described as a paradigm shift in the field of inverse problems. Her work on inverse scattering problems has been utilized in both the development of new methods in nondestructive testing as well as in improved techniques in synthetic aperture radar. Fundamental to Professor Cakoni’s investigations is the appearance of a new class of non-self-adjoint eigenvalue problems called transmission eigenvalues. This research is the subject matter of her book with David Colton and Houssem Haddar entitled Inverse Scattering Theory and Transmission Eigenvalues, the second edition of which has recently appeared in the CBMS-NSF Regional Series in Applied Mathematics published by SIAM. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26 with an associated lecture.
Duncan Dauvergne (University of Toronto), Janosch Ortmann (Université du Quebec à Montréal), and Bálint Virág (University of Toronto)
George Pólya Prize in Mathematics
The 2026 George Pólya Prize in Mathematics is awarded to Duncan Dauvergne, Janosch Ortmann, and Bálint Virág for the discovery of the directed landscape, the fundamental geometric object underlying the KPZ universality class. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26.
Magnus Fontes, Institut Roche and Lund University, France and Sweden
The I. E. Block Community Lecture, to be given by Magnus Fontes of Institut Roche and Lund University, is free and open to the public. Dr. Fontes is General Manager of Institut Roche, a Hoffmann-La Roche institute for collaborative biomedical research in France. He’s also an adjunct professor of mathematics at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. He co-founded the bioinformatics company Qlucore in 2007 and later held the position of Director of Bioinformatics for the International Network of Pasteur from 2014 to 2018 and head of Systems Immunology at Genentech in the U.S. from 2018 through 2020. He regularly publishes papers in high-impact journals such as Nature Communications, Nature Immunology, Science Immunology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The talk, which is intended to encourage public appreciation of the excitement and vitality of science by reaching students, teachers, and members of the local community, will be uploaded to YouTube following the event happening at SIAM AN26. More details will be available in coming months.
Mark Newman, University of Michigan, United States
The 2026 John von Neumann Prize is awarded to Mark Newman for his pioneering contributions to theoretical and algorithmic aspects of network science and to their use in understanding real-world systems. Newman’s work has illuminated notions of structure within networks and has provided widely-used algorithms for finding network structure and for quantifying its impact on the behavior of networks. He has authored multiple books and review papers that have spurred the widespread dissemination of network science concepts across the research community. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26.
Adrian Nachman, University of Toronto, Canada
The 2026 Julian Cole Lectureship is awarded to Adrian Nachman for his contributions to the mathematical foundations of imaging science and inverse problems, and the impact of his work on medical imaging. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26 with an associated lecture.
Fatih Dinc, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States
The 2026 Richard C. DiPrima Prize is awarded to Fatih Dinc for his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Extracting fundamental principles of computation in the mammalian brain from large scale neural recordings,” which has developed a remarkable bridge between applied mathematics and neuroscience, with the intellectual traffic flowing in both directions. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26.
Nandi Leslie, RTX, United States
The 2026 SIAM Industry Prize is awarded to Nandi Leslie for advancing the frontiers of cybersecurity and network resilience. Her innovations represent non standard, mathematically sophisticated frameworks with real operational relevance. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26 with an associated lecture.
Russel E. Caflisch, New York University, United States
SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession
The 2026 SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession is awarded to Russel E. Caflisch in recognition of his outstanding leadership and service to applied and computational mathematics. His far-reaching, positive impact on the SIAM community includes decades of careful editorship and outstanding service on SIAM journals, Board of Trustees, committees, and conferences. He has developed highly innovative national and international programs benefiting early, mid, and senior career mathematicians. Through his leadership of the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Dr. Caflisch launched exciting new programs that brought generations of mathematicians from a diverse range of communities to the frontier of scientific discoveries and innovations. With the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation, he has advocated for applied mathematics on the U.S. National Committee on Mathematics, the Board on International Scientific Organizations, the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics, and the Committee of Visitors. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26.
Anthony Bloch, University of Michigan, United States
The 2026 W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize is awarded to Anthony Bloch for his deep scientific contributions to geometric mechanics and control theory, particularly for nonholonomic dynamics and control. This prize will be awarded at SIAM AN26 with an associated lecture.
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