Roe Named Head of Department of Mathematics

17 May 2007 —John Roe, professor of mathematics, has been appointed as head of the Department of Mathematics. He succeeds Nigel Higson, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics, who had served as head of the department since 2004. Roe previously served the department as its associate chair for faculty development from 2003 to 2006 and as its associate head from 2000 to 2003.

Roe’s research focuses on connections between the very-large-scale and the very-small-scale structure of mathematical spaces. Roe says that small-scale structure usually is more computable while large-scale structure is more stable, and therefore more useful. “Any student of calculus knows that some parts of mathematics become simpler if viewed through a microscope,” explains Roe. “Now, we are beginning to realize that there are worthwhile simplifications to be made by looking through the wrong end of a telescope.” To relate the two kinds of structures, he uses a mathematical technique known as assembly, which was developed by Paul Baum and Nigel Higson, both professors of mathematics at Penn State, and their colleague in Paris, Alain Connes. “The key problem,” says Roe, “is to understand when the assembly process can be reversed.”

Roe has published over 40 scientific papers and has authored or co-authored six books, the most recent of which is Lectures on Coarse Geometry, published by the American Mathematical Society. He presented the Kemeny Lectures at Dartmouth College in 2001, the Andrejewski Lecture at University of Göttingen in Germany in 1997, and the CBMS Lectures in 1995 sponsored by the American Mathematical Society’s Conference Board for the Mathematical Sciences.

Roe began serving as a member of the Penn State Teaching and Learning Consortium’s Teaching-Assistant Team in 2001. Also in 2001, he designed and implemented a new induction, training, and oversight program for graduate teaching assistants which has positively transformed undergraduate instruction in the department. The Graduate Teaching Assistant Training Program is a multifaceted program that includes a semester-long induction and teaching assistant training course, a committee of faculty who take individual responsibility for overseeing each teaching assistant, a more intensive peer-to-peer mentoring program for the first course taught by each new teaching assistant, new teaching awards, and a departmental teaching seminar attended by both teaching assistants and faculty members.

His teaching and research achievements have been recognized with a number of awards, including the Junior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 1996 and the Distinguished Service Award from the Penn State Eberly College of Science Alumni Society in 2006.
He received a bachelor’s degree with honors in 1980 and a certificate of advanced study in 1981 from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He then received a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford in 1984. He was a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 1986; a visiting Fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, in 1985; a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and tutor in mathematics at Jesus College in Oxford from 1986 to 1998; an Ulam Research Professor of Mathematics at the University of Colorado in 1995. In 2004, he held the Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He joined the Penn State faculty in the fall of 1998.

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