2026 Kovalevsky Lecture

Citation. Professor Fioralba Cakoni is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University and is a fellow of both the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and SIAM. She is on the editorial board of the SIAM Journal of Mathematical Analysis, the SIAM Classics in Applied Mathematics book series, and has recently been appointed as the editor in chief of the journal Inverse Problems. Professor Cakoni is one of the founders and leading proponents of the qualitative approach to inverse scattering theory, a development that has been described as a paradigm shift in the field of inverse problems. Her influential research in inverse scattering has shaped the design of new methods in nondestructive testing and wave-based imaging. Central to her work is the study of a new class of non-self–adjoint eigenvalue problems known as transmission eigenvalues, which have attracted substantial attention in both the mathematical community and in applications to inverse problems. This research area is the focus of her book Inverse Scattering Theory and Transmission Eigenvalues, coauthored with David Colton and Houssem Haddar, the second edition of which has recently appeared in the National Science Foundation–Conference Boards of the Mathematical Sciences (NSF-CBMS)–the NSF-CBMS Regional Conference Series in Applied Mathematics published by SIAM.

Biographical Sketch. Fioralba Cakoni is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she has been since 2015. Prior to joining Rutgers, she was a postdoctoral Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and later a faculty member in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware. She has also held visiting research positions at École Polytechnique and École Nationale Supérieure de Technique Avanceés (ENSTA) in Paris. Professor Cakoni was named a Simons Fellow in Mathematics in 2016, elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019, and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2023. Professor Cakoni works in inverse scattering for inhomogeneous media, noniterative reconstruction methods, spectral methods in inverse scattering, and inverse problems for partial differential equations. She has coauthored more than 120 research articles and three monographs and her work has had a significant impact on the fields of inverse scattering and inverse problems.