Speakers
Take a look at the roster of plenary and public speakers for the 2025 Winter Meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society
Diana Skrzydlo
University of Waterloo
Education Plenary Lecture
Diana Skrzydlo is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and the current Math Faculty Teaching Fellow. She has been teaching at the University of Waterloo since 2007 and has spoken widely on innovative teaching and assessment techniques, including in Indonesia with the READI project. From 2019-2024 she was the Director of the MActSc program. She won the SAS department teaching award in 2016, the Faculty of Math Award for Distinction in Teaching in 2019, and the University Distinguished Teacher Award in 2023. Internationally, she was the recipient of the Robert V Hogg award
for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Statistics in 2023 and the first Society of Acutuaries Outstanding Educator Award in 2024. She has a BMath (2006) and MMath (2007) from UW, and achieved her ASA designation from the Society of Actuaries in 2018.
Monica Visan
University of California,
Los Angelas
Plenary Lecture
Monica Visan is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she has been a faculty member since 2009. She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2006. After two years as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2006-2008), she served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago (2008-2009) and was a Harrington Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin (2010-2011).
Visan's research interests span dispersive partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and completely integrable systems. Her work was recognized with a Clay Liftoff Fellowship in 2006, a Sloan Fellowship in 2010, a Frontiers of Science Award at the International Congress of Basic Science in 2023, a Simons Fellowship in 2024, the 2026 Emmy Noether Lecturer award, and a speaker invitation at the International Congress of Mathematics in 2026. Her research has also been supported by the US NSF since 2009.
Megumi Harada
McMaster University
Plenary Lecture
Megumi Harada is a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University. Dr. Harada joined McMaster in 2006. Prior to coming to McMaster, Dr. Harada was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Dr. Harada received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University (A.B. summa cum laude in Mathematics) and her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. Harada has been recognized for her contributions to both research and teaching. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and she held a Canada Research Chair Award from 2013 to 2023. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences in 2018, and received the
Krieger-Nelson Prize from the Canadian Mathematical Society in 2018. In addition, she was awarded the Ruth Michler Prize from the Association of Women in Mathematics in 2013, held an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation from 2008 to 2013, and held a University Faculty Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada from 2007 to 2012. In recognition for her commitment to teaching, she received the McMaster Student Union Teaching Award for the Faculty of Arts and Science in 2021, 2023, and 2025.
Louigi Addario-Berry
McGill
Public Lecture
Louigi Addario-Berry works in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University, as a Professor andd a Canada Research Chair in Discrete Probability.
Abstract:
Heights and diameters of random trees and graphs
Fix a finite set S of graphs, and let U be a uniformly random sample from S. We ask the question: what is the statistical behaviour of diam(U), the greatest graph distance between any two vertices in U? Many variants of this question have been asked, including for branching process trees (starting with the work of Kolmogorov 1938) and regular graphs (starting with the work of Bollobás 1982).
Two natural and very general settings for this question are when S has the form
S_1={T is a rooted tree with vertex set V(G)={1,...,n} and vertex degrees (d_1,...,d_n)}
or
S_2={G is a graph with vertex set V(G)={1,...,n} and vertex degrees (d_1,...,d_n)}
We explain how to answer such questions, and to prove tight diameter upper bounds, in both cases. One of the challenges in proving the results for S_2 is that in general we know neither how to approximately enumerate nor to efficiently sample from sets of the form S_2.
Time permitting, I may also discuss diameter lower bounds.
Based on joint works with Serte Donderwinkel, Gabriel Crudele, and Igor Kortchemski.