Recently, one of our three new faculty colleagues, Changfeng Gui, was awarded the prestigious Andre-Aisenstadt Prize by the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques of Canada. The Prize, created in 1991, is intended to recognize and reward talented young Canadian mathematicians. The Prize, which is given for research achievement in pure and applied mathematics, includes a $3000 [Canadian] award. At the time of nomination, candidates must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and no more than seven years from their PhD.

Changfeng joined us after six years in Canada. After earning bachelors and master's degrees from Peking University, in 1991 he earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota under the direction of Wei-Ming Ni. He chose Minnesota as his post-Beijing destination partly for programmatic reasons, partly because some friends a year or two ahead of him were there. After receiving his degree, Changfeng spent two years at the Courant Institute (New York), two years at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) and four years at the University of British Columbia, where he received tenure.

Changfeng specializes in non-linear partial differential equations: existence, asymptotics, symmetry, and stability properties of solutions to PDES. His work falls into two categories. First, he did joint work with Martin Barlow and Nassif Ghoussoub, both of UBC, and our own Rich Bass, then of the University of Washington, on the DeGiorgi conjecture, which concerns the symmetry of solutions in Euclidean space to an important PDE. The problem arises from studying phase transitions. Parenthetically, Changfeng did not actually meet Rich until he came to UConn as a job candidate last year.

Changfeng's more recent work has focused on mathematical models of biological pattern information. One considers an equation that describes a biological phenomenon involving two species: an activator and an inhibitor. Each might be a chemical or a virus or some other microorganism. The first might activate growth of new body parts of some organism, while the second might inhibit it. The object is to study the concentration function that models the density of the activator or inhibitor. The model is the standard Gierer-Meinhardt model. Changfeng's involvement with this problem began in 1993, though his advisor Ni had already been working on it for some years. Changfeng's first paper on the subject, written in 1995 and published in 1996, was a solo effort; his second was coauthored with Junchang Wei of Hong Kong. His work was a breakthrough from the study of single-concentration problems to that of multiple-concentration problems.