Leonid Berlyand
Leonid Berlyand is a Soviet and American mathematician, a professor of Penn State University. He is known for his works on homogenization, Ginzburg–Landau theory, mathematical modeling of active matter and deep learning. Life and career. Berlyand was born in Kharkov on September 20, 1957. His father, Viktor Berlyand, was a mechanical engineer, and his mother, Mayya Genkina, an electronics engineer. Upon his graduation in 1979 from the department of mathematics and mechanics at the National University of Kharkov, he began his doctoral studies at the same university and earned a Ph. D. in 1984. His Ph. D.  thesis studied the homogenization of elasticity problems. He worked at the Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics in Moscow. In 1991 he moved to the United States and started working at Pennsylvania State University, where he has served as a full professor since 2003. He has held long-term visiting positions at Princeton University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories. His research has drawn support from the National Science Foundation(NSF), NIH/NIGMS, the Applied Mathematics Program of the DOE Office of Sciences, BSF  (the Bi-National Science Foundation USA-Israel) and the NATO Science for Peace and Security Section. Berlyand has authored roughly 100 works on homogenization theory and PDE/variational problems in biology and material science. He has organized a number of professional conferences and serves as a co-director of the Center for Mathematics of Living and Mimetic Matter at Penn State University. He has supervised 17 graduate students and ten postdoctoral fellows. Research. Drawing upon fundamental works in classical homogenization theory, Berlyand advanced the methods of homogenization in many versatile applications. He obtained mathematical results applicable to diverse scientific areas  including biology, fluid mechanics, superconductivity, elasticity, and material science. His mathematical modeling explains striking experimental result in the collective swimming of bacteria. His homogenization approach to multi-scale problems was transformed into a practical computational tool by introducing a concept of polyharmonic homogenization which led to a new type of multiscale finite elements. Together with H. Owhadi, he introduced a "transfer-of-approximation" modeling concept, based on the similarity of the asymptotic behavior of the errors of Galerkin solutions for two elliptic PDEs. He also contributed to mathematical aspects of the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity/superfluidity by introducing a  new class of semi-stiff boundary problems.