UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Pierre-Emmanuel Jabin, professor of mathematics, and Didier Bresch, research director at the Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, have been awarded the Best Paper Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Partial Differential Equations (APDE). The award recognizes their 2018 paper titled “Global existence of weak solutions for compressible Navier–Stokes equations: Thermodynamically unstable pressure and anisotropic viscous stress tensor,” which appears in the Annals of Mathematics.

The SIAM/APDE Best Paper Prize highlights a paper published in the previous four years that contains significant research contributions to the field of partial differential equations. The award will be presented at the SIAM/APDE conference in March 2022.

“We are grateful and honored to be awarded this prize, especially given how many breakthrough papers have been published in the field of partial differential equations in the four calendar years preceding 2021,” said Jabin. “By such recognition, we really hope to attract young researchers to work on applied mathematics.”

Jabin and Bresch’s paper provides new solutions for a set of partial differential equations called the Navier–Stokes equations that describe the motion of fluids. The researchers consider scenarios that are more realistic than some previous solutions, focusing on laws of pressure that are not thermodynamically stable. This involved a fine analysis of the structure of the equations as well as new approaches to address transport equations. Their work ultimately lays the theoretical basis for using these equations for a variety of practical applications, for example to describe solar events, geophysical flows, or biological situations.

“Our estimates have direct implications aspects of fluid mechanics models, and we can now apply a fine level of control to several complex models in engineering and physics,” said Jabin.

Jabin is known for his work in partial differential equations and kinetic theory. He is particularly interested in the theory of transport and advection phenomena and in systems with many interacting particles or agents, which have applications in the fields of physics and biosciences.

Jabin has published more than 70 scientific articles and has presented many invited talks, including as an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. He serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Networks and Heterogeneous Media and serves on the editorial board of several other journals, including Mathematical Models and Methods in Applied Sciences, Kinetic and Related Models, and the SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Jabin was a professor at the University of Maryland, where he served as director of the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling. Jabin earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics in 1996, a master’s degree in mathematics in 1997 from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, also known as the University of Paris VI, while a student of École Normale Supérieur. He earned a doctorate in 2000 and an HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) in 2003 while at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI). Jabin was an assistant professor (agrégé-préparateur) at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 2000 to 2004. He then became a professor at the Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis in France from 2004 to 2011 and held a visiting faculty position at the Institute for Research in Informatics and Automatics in Sophia-Antipolis, France, from 2007 to 2011.