Professor Uhlmann’s research focuses on inverse problems and imaging, microlocal analysis and partial differential equations. His research has been applied to the fields of geophysics and medical imaging. Professor Uhlmann is also interested in cloaking and invisibility, and is one of the pioneers of the idea of transformation optics for the case of electrostatics.

Professor Gunther Uhlmann, Walker Family Endowed Professor in Mathematics at the University of Washington, has been appointed IAS Si Yuan Professor, also joining the University’s Department of Mathematics.  The world’s leading mathematician on inverse problem and imaging whose focus is on determining the identity of an object by measuring its properties identified by incoming light, sound waves or other types of waves.  It has wide applications and implications, including shedding light on the elusive phenomenon of invisibility.  His interest and expertise in this area is a reflection of his deeply-held belief about the universal importance of mathematics, which is now becoming increasingly relevant in many other fields, such as physics, computer science and materials science.  Mathematics, in turn, has been enriched by its interaction with these other fields, so that it is becoming less of an enclosed discipline and finds newer problems suggested by such interactions.  With such a fierce focus, it is little wonder that he won the Kleinman prize (awarded to one person every other year) by the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.  A famed mathematician with a global following, Professor Uhlmann has received numerous international accolades, among them Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, Finnish Distinguished Professor 2013-17, Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences 2011, Chair of Excellence 2012-13 of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris, the Bôcher Memorial Prize (awarded once every three or five years by the American Mathematical Society), and the 2021 AMS-SIAM George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics jointly awarded by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).  Professor Uhlmann is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He delivered the IAS Distinguished Lecture at HKUST in August 2011 and again in November 2012.  A globally much sought-after lecturer, he was the holder of the Excellence in Teaching Chair at the University of California at Irvine from 2010 to 2012.

He has a long and distinguished record in serving on the editorial boards of many mathematical journals, including “Inverse Problems”, “SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis” and “Analysis and PDE”, and on the Editorial Board of “Advances in Applied Mathematics”.