Kui Ren Elected to 2027 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society

Kui Ren, professor of Applied Mathematics in Columbia Engineering’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics (APAM), has been elected to the 2027 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). He is among 43 distinguished mathematicians from institutions around the world selected for this prestigious honor.

The AMS Fellows program recognizes mathematicians who have made exceptional contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and application of mathematics. Fellows are nominated and selected by their peers, with each annual class limited to a small fraction of one percent of the Society’s membership, making election a significant professional distinction.

Professor Ren’s research spans several areas of applied and computational mathematics. His work includes the theoretical and numerical analysis of inverse problems involving partial differential equations, with applications to biomedical imaging; the mathematical modeling and computation of high-frequency acoustic and electromagnetic wave propagation in random media; the study of random graphs and networks; and the development of numerical algorithms for kinetic modeling of electrostatics and charge transport in semiconductor devices.

Ren earned his B.S. from Nanjing University in China and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics in May 2006. Following his doctoral studies, he joined the University of Chicago as a L.E. Dickson Instructor in 2007. In 2008, he moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where he joined the Department of Mathematics and the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and eventually became a tenured professor.

Ren returned to Columbia Engineering in 2018 as a member of the Applied Mathematics faculty in APAM. He is also affiliated with Columbia’s Data Science Institute, the Initiative for Computational Science and Engineering, and Artificial Intelligence@Columbia.

His previous honors include the 2017 Calderón Prize and the 2025 Feng Kang Prize. In 2026, he was also elected a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

His election to the 2027 AMS Class of Fellows is a wonderful recognition of his distinguished career and the significant contributions he continues to make to the field of applied mathematics.