May 20, 2016 [TORONTO] The Fields Institute is pleased to announce that Tom Salisbury has been named the new Associate Director of Industry Liaison, after a search that began in the winter of 2016. Candidates for the position were encouraged to apply from all over the country, as well as internationally. 

With over 30 years of experience, Salisbury is a leading figure in probability theory, specifically Brownian motion and related Markov processes, including their applications to mathematical finance and actuarial sciences.  

Dr. Salisbury replaces Dr. Huaxiong Huang, who will be the next Deputy Director of the Fields Institute starting July 2016. During his term as Associate Director of Industry Liaison(September 2014 to July 2016), Dr. Huang oversaw the implementation of the Institutes Innovation Platform (IIP), a new collaboration between Fields, the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) and the Centre de recherches mathématique. 

Salisbury’s duties will include organizing workshops, job fairs, and events with the aim to develop a scientific environment that nurtures connections and collaborations between academic researchers and scientists in industry. He will also coordinate with the Fields Institute Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) and with the Industry Liaison counterparts at PIMS and CRM as part of the national Institutes Innovation Platform. 

In response to his goals for his position Salisbury said, “The Fields Institute is taking the lead in getting mathematicians talking to industry, and showing industry how it can make use of mathematicians. We have seen this idea in the Quantitative Finance Seminar, where the monthly Fields seminar is the main Toronto event at which academics from various institutions meet with each other. I am eager to play a key role and developing that effort further.”

Dr. Salisbury’s tenure as the new Associate Director of Industry Liaison will commence on September 1st, 2016. 

About Dr. Tom Salisbury

Dr. Thomas S. Salisbury received his BSc from McGill University in 1979, and his PhD in mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 1983. After a postdoctoral position as a Research Assistant Professor at Purdue University, he then moved to York University where he is a Professor and former department chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics., He was co-editor-in-chief of the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, and has served on the editorial boards of Probability Theory and Related Fields, Fields Institute Communications & Monographs, Potential Analysis, and the Canadian Journal of Statistics. 

At York University, Salisbury teaches financial engineering and was director of analytics at Quantitative Wealth Management Analytics group (QWeMA) prior to the latter's acquisition by CANNEX, and led the Finsurance project at MITACS. In 2007, he chaired the task force that initiated the revision of the Ontario’s grade 12 curriculum, and then served on the Ontario Minister of Education's curriculum council. He served terms as Deputy Director of the Fields Institute from 2003-2006, and as President of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2006–2008. 

About the Fields Institute

Founded in 1992, the Fields Institute is a leading international research centre located on the campus of the University of Toronto.

The mission of the Institute is to enhance mathematical activity in Canada by bringing together mathematicians from Canada and abroad, and by promoting contact and collaboration between professional mathematicians and the increasing numbers of users of mathematics. Thus the Institute supports research in pure and applied mathematics, statistics and computer science, as well as collaboration between mathematicians and those applying mathematics in areas such as engineering, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, economics and finance, telecommunications and information systems.

Every year, its programs attract more than 4000 participants from around the world. The Institute is supported by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation (US), and a growing list of partner universities and corporations in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

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