University of British Columbia | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

The University of British Columbia PIMS site office is located in the Earth Sciences Building at the University of British Columbia.

The University of British Columbia PIMS site office also hosts the PIMS central offices. These are located on the 4th floor of the Earth Sciences Building (2207 Main Mall). If using the elevator, our offices will be directly across when you get to the 4th floor. If using the main staircase, the offices will be to your right once you reach the 4th floor.

Infectious diseases are complex systems across many scales. In this talk, I will use mathematical models to investigate a range of cross-scale questions in infectious disease eco-evolutionary dynamics. I will begin by modelling the transition from...

TBA

A fundamental challenge in infection biology is predicting the dynamics of within-host microbial growth and immune activation. However, data typically comes as static snapshots, limiting our ability to test theories. Therefore, we established live...

Many viruses evolve fast enough to accumulate significant genetic diversity over the course of an outbreak, allowing us to build trees that represent the evolutionary history of virus lineages. Phylodynamic models allow us to infer the...

As in previous years, we will be running three preparation sessions to help you keep your math skills sharp and get you ready for the competition. The first preparation session will take place on Saturday, December 14th from 10am-12pm in Earth...

Calling all UBC students, staff, faculty, and researchers - all are welcome - FREE to attend! Make sure to register so you don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to hear from a leader in science communication and equity! Join us for a morning...

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Please note. The 2025 competition is provisionally scheduled for May 3rd. This date is room booking availability and will be finalized in February 2025. ELMACON is an annual math contest for students in grades 5, 6, and 7. Students tackle hard...

Many problems in discrete geometry can be conveniently encoded by a structure known as a semialgebraic graph. These problems include the Erdős unit distance problem and many of its variants, point-line incidence problems studied by Szemerédi–Trotter...

The shuffle theorem is a celebrated result in algebraic combinatorics that identifies three objects: the Frobenius character of certain Sn representations, the action of the elliptic Hall algebra on symmetric functions, and a particular combinatorial...

The degeneracy of a graph is a measure of sparseness that gives important information about its Ramsey- and Turán-type properties. I will talk about the hypergraph extension of these problems. The typical notion of hypergraph degeneracy does not give...

In this talk we will explore the connection between the two seemingly unrelated concepts appearing in the title. Phase transitions occur when a system undergoes an abrupt change in behaviour as a consequence of a small change in parameters. While...

A Lipschitz function on a graph G is a function f:V->Z from the vertex set of the graph to the integers which changes by at most 1 along any edge of the graph. Given a finite connected graph G, and fixing the value of the function to be 0 on at least...

The human population presents a unique ecosystem for studying pathogen communities, with anthropogenic activities like COVID-19 lockdowns serving as large-scale natural experiments. In this talk, I begin by exploring how host immune response...

Gradient flows have emerged as a powerful framework for analyzing machine learning and statistical inference algorithms. Motivated by several applications in statistical inference, generative models, generalization, and robustness of learning...

The quadratically regularized optimal transport problem (QOT) has emerged in the literature as a sparse alternative to entropic regularization (EOT). Unlike EOT, whose solutions always have full support—even for small regularization parameters—QOT...

Current LLM alignment techniques use pairwise human preferences at a sample level, and as such, they do not imply an alignment on the distributional level. We propose in this paper Alignment via Optimal Transport (AOT), a novel method for...

What happens to Wasserstein gradient flows if one uses entropic optimal transport instead of classical optimal transport? I will explain why it may be relevant to use Sinkhorn divergences, built on entropic optimal transport, as they allow the...

Directions

The PIMS offices are located on the 4th floor of the Earth Sciences Building (2207 Main Mall). If using the elevator, our offices will be directly across when you get to the 4th floor. If using the main staircase, the offices will be to your right once you reach the 4th floor.

Airport to PIMS UBC by Bus

From Vancouver Airport (YVR), take the Canada Line Skytrain to Broadway City Hall Station. Get off the platform and walk up to street level. Cross the street and you should see the #99Bline UBC stop outside the Lululemon store. You can take this bus all the way out to UBC. Detailed route information is available through translink's route planner or via google maps. See translink's fare page for up to date prices.

Airport to PIMS UBC by car

To drive from Vancouver Airport (YVR) to UBC, follow signs for Vancouver City Center when leaving the airport. After crossing the Arthur Laing bridge, follow 70th avenue/Marine Drive all the way out to UBC's Point Grey campus. The PIMS offices are in the Earth Science Building on Main Mall which doesn't permit vehicular traffic. The nearest parking lot (or drop off point for Taxis) is on West Mall near the West Parkade at the intersection of West Mall and Bio. Sciences Road (see this map).

Downtown Vancouver to PIMS UBC by car

When leaving Downtown Vancouver, follow signs for UBC (see this map).

Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal to PIMS UBC by car

Follow directions for Vancouver airport until you reach the City of Vancouver, then follow the directions above for travelling from the airport.

BC Ferries

US Border to PIMS UBC by car

Follow directions for Vancouver until you reach the City of Vancouver, then follow the directions above for travelling to PIMS from the airport. Please make sure you have the correct travel documents and follow instructions

ArriveCan

Travelling between UBC and SFU by bus

There are many public transit options for travel between UBC and SFU but please note the universities are at opposite ends of Vancouver (SFU is actually in Burnaby) and travel can take an hour or more. Visit Translink for more travel options.

Staff

Position	Name	Email	Phone #	Office
PIMS Site Director - University of British Columbia	Brian Marcus	marcus@math.ubc.ca	+1 (604) 328-1471	Math Building 218
Chief Operations Officer	Denise Feighan	denise@pims.math.ca	(604) 822-1522	Room 4158
Co-Director International	Gabriel Paternain	international@pims.math.ca
Technology Manager	Ian Allison	iana@pims.math.ca	(778) 991-1522	Room 4126
Program and Events Manager	Joanne Jiang	programs@pims.math.ca	(604) 822-3611	Room 4168
Communications Manager	Krysten Casumpang	communications@pims.math.ca	(604) 822-0406	Room 4162
Communications and Event Assistant	Lisa Sammoh	lisa@pims.math.ca	(604)822-3922	ESB4166
Education Coordinator	Melania Alvarez	melania@pims.math.ca	(604) 822-0404	Room 4164
Executive Assistant	Oscar Cetnarowski	executive-assistant@pims.math.ca	(604) 822-3922	ESB4173
Director, Professor of Mathematics University of British Columbia	Özgür Yilmaz	director@pims.math.ca	(604) 822-0406	Room 4162
Finance Manager	Pooja Sharma	finance@pims.math.ca	(604) 822-3782	Room 4172

Name	Original Location	In	Out
Seick Kim	Yonsei University	17 January 2022	22 January 2022
Perla Kfoury	University of Toulouse	07 October 2021	27 October 2021
Stefan Le Coz	University of Toulouse	07 October 2021	29 October 2021
Hui Chen	Zhejiang University of Science	01 September 2021	01 September 2022
Takahisa Inui	Osaka University	01 September 2021	01 September 2022
Rustum Choksi	McGill University	07 August 2021	31 December 2021

Name	Position	Research Interests	Supervisor	Year
Federico Trinca	PIMS-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Differential geometry & PDE	Sebastien Picard	2024
Wenjun Zhao	PIMS-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Optimal Transportation	Young-Heon Kim	2024
Jakwang Kim	PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Statistics	Young-Heon Kim	2023
Lucas Teyssier	PIMS-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Probability Theory & Stochastic Processes	Jonathan Hermon	2023
Paul Péringuey	PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Number Theory	Greg Martin	2023
Sarah Dijols	PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Representation Theory	Julia Gordon	2023
Gai Guodong	PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Fluid Mechanics	Anthony Wachs	2022
Nabarun Deb	PIMS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia	Optimal Transportation	Young-Heon Kim	2022
Nicholas Rouse	PIMS Postdoctoral Researcher, University of British Columbia	Low Dimension Topology	Ben Williams	2022
Timon Salar Gutleb	PIMS Postdoctoral Researcher, University of British Columbia	Numerical Analysis	Christoph Ortner	2022
Anirudh Asuri Mukundan	Postdoctoral Researcher	Fluid Mechanics	Anthony Wachs	2021
Evan Miller	Postdoctoral Researcher	Partial Differential Equations	Tai-Peng Tsai	2021
Wenzhao Chen	Postdoctoral Researcher	Manifolds and Cell Complexes	Liam Watson	2021
Babru Joshi	University of British Columbia	High Dimensional Data Analysis	Özgür Yilmaz	2019
Brian Freidin	Postdoctoral Researcher, University of British Columbia	Differential geometry	Jingyi Chen	2019
Hugo Lavenant	University of British Columbia	Partial Differential Equations	Young-Heon Kim	2019
Thomas Budzinski	University of British Columbia	Probability		2019
Arthur Ghigo	University of British Columbia	Fluid Mechanics	Anthony Wachs	2018
Jishnu Ray	University of British Columbia	Number Theory	Sujatha Ramdorai	2018
Jongchon Kim	University of British Columbia	Fourier Analysis	Malabika Pramanik	2018
Yifan Sun	University of British Columbia	Computer Science	Michael Friedlander	2018
Fei Hu	University of British Columbia	Geometric Topology	Zinovy Reichstein	2017
Nguyen Lam	University of British Columbia	Partial Differential Equations	Nassif Ghoussoub	2016
Nicolau Sarquis Aiex		Geometric Analysis	Jingyi Chen	2016
Tobias Huxol	University of British Columbia	Geometric Analysis	Ailana Fraser	2016
Abbas Mehrabian	University of British Columbia	Optimization	Nick Harvey	2015
Justin Tzou	University of British Columbia	Applied Partial Differential Equations	Michael Ward	2015
Richárd Balka	University of British Columbia	Probability	Ed Perkins	2015
Duncan R. Hewitt	University of British Columbia	Fluid Mechanics	Neil Balmforth	2014
Khoa Dang Nguyen	University of Calgary	Diophantine geometry and algebraic dynamics	Dragos Ghioca	2014