Charles S. Peskin

Charles Samuel Peskin (born April 15, 1946) is an American mathematician known for his work in the mathematical modeling of blood flow in the heart. Such calculations are useful in the design of artificial heart valves. From this work has emerged an original computational method for fluid-structure interaction that is now called the “immersed boundary method", which allows the coupling between deformable immersed structures and fluid flows to be handled in a computationally tractable way. With his students and colleagues, Peskin also has worked on mathematical models of such systems as the inner ear, arterial pulse, blood clotting, congenital heart disease, light adaptation in the retina, control of ovulation number, control of plasmid replication, molecular dynamics, and molecular motors.

Peskin received an A.B. (1968) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. (1972) from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University and shortly thereafter joined the faculty of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He has been a productive educator of applied mathematicians, and has advised more than fifty graduate students as of 2014. Peskin is a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1969 he married Lucille G. Bisesi. Their son Eric is the manager of High Performance Computing at New York University.

Publications

Awards and honors George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics from AMS–SIAM, 2003 Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, 1994 Sidney Fernbach Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society, 1994 Cray Research Information Technology Leadership Award for Breakthrough Computational Science, 1994 Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer, American Mathematical Society, 1993 New York University Margaret and Herman Sokol Faculty Award in the Sciences, 1992 James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, SIAM, 1985 MacArthur Fellowship, 1983–1988 a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1995, and a member of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) since 2000. He is also an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.