Visit the Fields Institute Fellows page to learn more about the distinction and previous inductees.

Robert J. Birgeneau

Robert J. Birgeneau became the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, on September 22, 2004 serving until May 31, 2013.  An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community.  During his service as Chancellor, Birgeneau strengthened UC Berkeley’s standing as one of the top few universities, public or private, in the world. Under his leadership Berkeley became the first university in the United States to offer comprehensive financial aid to undocumented students and the first public university to provide significant financial aid to middle class students.

Before coming to Berkeley, Birgeneau served four years as President of the University of Toronto. He previously was Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent 25 years on the faculty. He is a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society and other scholarly societies. He has received many awards for teaching and for his research on the fundamental properties of materials.

Michael Harris

Michael Harris obtained his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his Ph.D at Harvard, where he wrote his thesis under the direction of Barry Mazur. He has written roughly 100 research articles in number theory, primarily on questions concerned with the  special values of automorphic L-functions, the geometry of Shimura varieties, and with the local and global Langlands programs. 

Harris successively held professorships at Brandeis University; at Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, where he is now an emeritus professor; and since 2013 at Columbia University. He shared the Clay Research Award with Richard Taylor and received the Grand Prix Sophie Germain de l'Académie des Sciences, both in 2007. He was named to the Institut Universitaire de France in 2001 and directed the Automorphic Forms project of the Institut Mathématique de Jussieu from 2001-2007. He is a member of Academia Europea, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sujatha Ramdorai

Sujatha Ramdorai is an algebraic number theorist known for her work on Iwasawa theory. She is a professor of mathematics and Canada Research Chair at University of British Columbia, Canada. She was previously a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

She is a member of the Scientific Committee of several international research agencies such as the Indo-French Centre for Promotion of Advanced Research, Banff International Research Station, International Centre for Pure and Applied Mathematics. She is at present a member of the Prime Minister's Scientific Advisory Council from 2009 onwards and also a member of the National Innovation Council

Ramdorai won the prestigious ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2006. She was also awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, the highest honour in scientific fields by the Indian Government in 2004. She is also the recipient of the 2020 Krieger–Nelson Prize for her exceptional contributions to mathematics research.

Ulrike Tillmann

Ulrike Tillmann has worked broadly in topology, K-theory, and non-commutative geometry. Her work on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and manifolds of higher dimensions has been inspired by problems in quantum physics and string theory, while new challenges in data science have motivated some of her recent work. 

Tillman has been a professor of mathematics at Oxford University since 2000. Since 2021, she is the Director of the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. Tillmann was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 2004 and the Bessel-Humboldt Forschungs Preis in 2008. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2008, an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012, a member of the Leopoldina in 2017 and a member of EurASc 2022. She was a member of the Council of the Royal Society where she also served as (interim) Vice-President and is now chair of its Education Committee. She just finished her term as President of the London Mathematical Society and is a Vice-president of the International Mathematical Union.