About the Lecturer Prize
The Frederic and Julia Wan Lecturer Prize is established to honor Frederic and Julia Wan in recognition of their generous contributions and services to the Department of Applied Mathematics. The endowments they have helped establish to support our faculty and students can be found in the Support Applied Math section of this website. Please click here if you wish to contribute to these funds.
The Lecturer Prize aims to invite accomplished mathematicians to visit the department over an extended period, roughly a week. A guest lecturer is expected to deliver two or three lectures ranging from technical talks to experts to expository talks to the general public. Additionally, the visitors would actively engage with members of the department or the broader UW community.
Previous Awardees
- Spring 2023: Qing Nie, Department of Mathematic and the NSF-Simons Center for Multiscale Cell Fate (CMCF) Research, University of California, Irvine
About Frederic Wan
Frederic Y.M. Wan was born in 1936 in Shanghai, China, first born of Olga Pearl Jung and Wai-nam Wan. Living with sister Ruth and her husband Robert Chinn's family, Frederic graduated from Seattle’s Garfield High. He went east to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including his PhD (1965) in Mathematics under the direction of Eric Reissner. Frederic stayed at MIT as an instructor, moving on to Assistant Professor (1967) and Associate Professor (1969) of Applied Mathematics. Read more
About Julia Wan
Julia Y.S. Chang was born in Hong Kong in 1937 and lived in Shantou, China until 1947 when she and her parents moved to Hong Kong. After graduation from high school in Sydney, Australia, Julia came to the U.S. to attend Wellesley College. She received a B.A. in Physics in 1960. She married Frederic Wan in 1960 and worked as a research biochemist which led to publications in Science and in the Proceedings for the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. Read more