David Jerison

Bio

David Jerison received the A.B. from Harvard in 1975, and the Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980 under the direction of Elias Stein. Following an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, Professor Jerison joined the MIT mathematics faculty in 1981. He served as Chair of the Undergraduate Mathematics Committee, 1988-91, Chair of the Pure Mathematics Committee, 2002-04 and 2009-11, and co-Chair of the Graduate Student Committee 2007-09.

Professor Jerison's research is focussed on Fourier analysis and PDEs, especially elliptic free boundary problems. He is a principal investigator for the Simons Collaboration on Waves in Disorder, a cross-disciplinary study based on experiments with inorganic and organic semiconductors and Bose-Einstein condensates. Jerison serves regularly as faculty advisor to SPUR, the math department's summer research program for undergraduates, as well as RSI, a high school science summer research program at MIT. He is also known for his widely viewed, on-line lectures in calculus on MIT's OCW and edX.

Jerison received a Sloan Research Fellowship and a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985. In 1994 he delivered an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1999. In 2004, he was selected as a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. Jerison was awarded the Bergman Prize in Complex Analysis, with his collaborator Jack Lee, in 2012. In 2016, he received the inaugural MITx Prize for Teaching and Learning in MOOCs by the MIT Office of Digital, as a member of the Department's edX group. He served a three-year term as Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 2017 to 2020. In 2018, he received a Simons Fellowship, and, in 2019, a Guggenheim Fellowship.