Robert Adler was born, bred and educated (in Probability and Statistics) in Australia. In 1980 he moved to the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, where he has been ever since, modulo a number of visits to leading US universities, including three years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the author of three books on Gaussian processes and random fields, and the co-editor of two others, one on stable processes and one on physical oceanography. From 1996-1999 he served as the Editor of the Bernoulli Society's journal Stochastic Processes and their Applications, and is currently serving as Editor of the Annals of Applied Probability.

Robert is probably best known for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of the random geometry generated by smooth random fields, having developed theories of both intrinsic mathematical interest and wide application. It is on these topics and, especially, on recent work with Jonathan Taylor from Stanford, that he will lecture at the Graduate School.

Professor Warren Ewens originally comes from the land downunder. He was educated in mathematics and statistics at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University and was Professor of Mathematics at La Trobe University before leaving, in 1972, to become Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

Warren is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science; Gold Medalist, Australian Statistical Society; Fellow of the Royal Society; and member of the Scientific Advisory Boards at the Genomics Institutes in both Pennsylvania and Singapore. He won the Lindback Teaching Award at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002; the Weldon Prize at Oxford University in 2003; and the Browne Distinguished Professor of Biology in 2003.

Dr Jeroen Lamb is a Reader and EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow at the Department of Mathematics of Imperial College London. His main research interest lies in the study of dynamical systems with symmetry, with a focus on bifurcation theory, and applications reaching from pattern formation to mechanics. One of his main other research interests is the mathematics of aperiodic tilings.

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Dr Lamb studied Theoretical Physics and received his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 1994. Before his arrival at Imperial College London in 1999, he had research positions at the University of Warwick and the University of Houston.

Dr Stephen Bigelow (alias Deuce) is currently Assistant Professor in Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

He was a student at Melbourne University from 1989 to 1995 where he obtained a Bachelor of Science, a Masters in Mathematics, and an acceptance letter from the Berkeley Graduate Program. He finished his PhD in 2000. Stephen's thesis was about braid groups, which really are groups of braids, as in hair or macramé. He spent two years back at Melbourne University as a Research Fellow in 2000-2002, and was then offered a tenure track job in Santa Barbara, where he has been living ever since.

Stephen still spends most of his research hours thinking about braids, in particular how to use them to study representations of other groups by matrices.

Mark was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, and moved to Melbourne at the age of five. He received his BSc (Hons) from Monash University in 1992. After studying with Nicholas Katz, he received his PhD from Princeton in 1998. From 1998 to 2001, he was an ARC Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, after which he spent three years in Muenster, Germany. He is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.

Mark's research interests have involved various aspects of arithmetic, geometry and number theory. At the moment he is interested in questions involving modular forms, Galois representations and p-adic Hodge theory.

James Meiss received a PhD in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980, studying the nonlinear evolution of internal waves in the ocean. He then obtained a postdoctoral fellowship that evolved into a research scientist position with the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Work on plasma physics included studies of drift waves, tearing mode instabilities and chaotic particle motion in magnetic fields, culminating in the textbook Plasma Confinement co-authored with Richard Hazeltine.