Robbert Dijkgraaf Joins Simons Foundation Board of Directors

Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor, has been appointed to serve on the Simons Foundation’s board of directors. Complementary to the IAS mission, the Simons Foundation seeks to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.

Dijkgraaf brings a wealth of experience to this new role through his continued leadership at IAS and as a global communicator and influencer of science policy. He is also known for his significant contributions to string theory and to research at the interface between mathematics and particle physics.

Dijkgraaf joins fellow board members Emery Brown, a physician-scientist; mathematician David Eisenbud; physician Margaret A. Hamburg; physicist Peter Littlewood; computer scientist William H. Press; hedge fund executive Mark Silber; molecular biologist Shirley M. Tilghman (also an IAS Trustee); Simons Foundation president Marilyn H. Simons; and Simons Foundation chairman James H. Simons (also IAS Trustee Emeritus).

In 2003, Dijkgraaf received the Spinoza Prize, the Netherlands’ top scientific award. He previously served as president of the InterAcademy Partnership and co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national science academies that advises the United Nations, the World Bank and other international organizations. He also served as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Co-founded in New York City by Jim and Marilyn Simons, the Simons Foundation exists to support basic—or discovery-driven—scientific research undertaken in the pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world.

The Simons Foundation supports research by making grants to individual investigators and their projects through academic institutions, and, with the launch of the Flatiron Institute in 2016, now conducts scientific research in-house, supporting teams of top computational scientists.

Read more at Simons Foundation.