Donald Dawson, Professor Emeritus at the Carleton School of Mathematics and Statistics, was recently named a Fellow of the Royal Society. Fellows are drawn from the UK and the Commonwealth and are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science.
Professor Dawson is one of the world’s leading researchers in probability and random processes. He has played a pivotal role in initiating and developing mathematical models and methods, such as the Dawson-Watanabe super process, to study the development of systems in time and space. These processes are based on the premise that future events are independent of past events as they model random fluctuations over space and time. These infinite dimensional processes provide a powerful framework and have applications in many fields including finance (pricing options and measuring risk), epidemiology (estimating probabilities that an epidemic will grow or die out), genetics and genomics (estimating the probability that two samples of DNA come from related individuals), network science (understanding network structure such as the Internet or metabolic network) and ecology (estimating the rate of species formation or the stability of an ecosystem).
Professor Dawson has served as president of the Bernoulli Society, director of the Fields Institute and was a member of the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) International Review of UK Mathematics. He has received the Carleton University Research Achievement Award, Max Planck Research Award for International Cooperation, CRM-Fields Institute Prize and the gold medal of the Statistical Society of Canada.
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