NYU Announces Chaired Professorships for Eric Vanden-Eijnden and Laure Zanna

February 12, 2025

New York University has announced that two Courant Mathematics faculty members will receive chaired professorships this semester. These appointments are designated by the University Provost and approved by the Board of Trustees.

Eric Vanden-Eijnden, a Professor of Mathematics, will hold the Paulette Goddard Chair in Mathematics. Goddard Chairs are supported by a generous gift bestowed upon the university by the actress and philanthropist Paulette Goddard Remarque in 1986. Goddard Chaired Professorships recognize the top scholars and leaders across all schools at NYU.

Professor Vanden-Eijnden focuses on the mathematical and computational aspects of statistical mechanics, with applications to complex dynamical systems arising in molecular dynamics,  materials science, atmosphere-ocean science, fluid dynamics, and neural networks. He has investigated the mathematical foundations of machine learning (ML) and started to explore the exciting new prospects ML offers for scientific computing. His work combines tools from probability theory, mathematical physics, numerical analysis, and optimization to uncover governing principles in complex systems and design efficient algorithms for their simulation. Professor Vanden-Eijnden has won the Germund Dahlquist Prize and the J.D. Crawford Prize, and he has received the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship and Sloan Research Fellowship.

Laure Zanna, a Professor of Mathematics & Atmosphere/Ocean Science, will be the inaugural recipient of the Joseph B. Keller and Herbert B. Keller Professorship in Applied Mathematics. This chair was created through an endowment by Joseph Keller in honor of his and his brother’s contributions to the field of applied mathematics. Joseph Keller received the John von Neumann Prize, the Wolfe Prize, and the National Medal of Science throughout his career; he taught at Courant for three decades and led the Institute’s Wave Division. Herbert Keller was a leading researcher in applied mathematics and numerical analysis; he was a professor of applied mathematics at CalTech. 

Professor Zanna is a climate physicist in the Department of Mathematics at the Courant Institute and the Center for Data Science. Her research focuses on understanding, simulating and predicting the role of the ocean in climate on local and global scales. She combines theory, numerical simulations, statistics, and machine learning to tackle a wide range of problems in fluid dynamics and climate, including turbulence, multiscale modeling, ocean heat and carbon uptake, and sea level rise. Since 2020, she is leading M²LInES, an international collaboration sponsored by Schmidt Sciences dedicated to improving climate models using scientific machine learning. In 2020, Prof Zanna received the Nicholas P. Fofonoff Award from the American Meteorological Society “for exceptional creativity in the development and application of new concepts in ocean and climate dynamics,” and was the 2022 WHOI Geophysical Fluid Dynamics principal lecturer.