Speaker Bio

Thanasis Fokas has a B.S. in Aeronautics from Imperial College, a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Caltech, and an M.D. from the University of Miami. He also has eight honorary degrees. In 1995 he was appointed to a Chair at Imperial College and in 2002 he became the first holder of the inaugural Chair of Nonlinear Mathematical Science at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the Academy of Athens and of all three major European Academies, including Academia Europaea. He is a Fellow of Clare Hall College, Cambridge, of the Guggenheim Foundation, and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Among his many awards are the Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society, the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences, The Kruskal Award of SIAM, and Caltech’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. Also, the Aristos prize of the Academy of Athens and the Excellence prize of the Bodossaki Foundation. Israel Gelfand wrote that “Fokas is a rare scientist in the style of Renaissance”. This is consistent with his unprecedented in terms of breadth and depth books, Ways of Comprehending (World Scientific,2024) and The Embodied Brain: unravelling AI, Medicine, Physics (World Scientific,2026).