Dr. Daniel Jerison

Dr. Jerison completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Stanford University and then served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell University. His strong interest in teaching, mentoring, and developing curriculum led to excellent teaching reviews. He is valued as a “sounding board,” with a way of restating difficult material in a particularly transparent way.

Dr. Jerison studies systems governed by simple rules that nonetheless exhibit complex behaviors, such as phase transitions—for instance, when a slight temperature increase causes ice to melt into liquid water; and threshold phenomena—for instance, when a small extra deposit of soil causes a stable slope to topple over into a landslide. At the point where a phase transition occurs, the system is quite unstable: small localized fluctuations easily propagate into macroscopic effects. In his work, he aims to provide precise mathematical characterizations of this instability for models of interest.

Dr. Jerison looks forward to developing collaborative relationships at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University. He calls Israel a world center for research in probability theory, and he hopes to work with researchers at other Israeli universities as well.