Profile
José Miguel Urbano was born in Coimbra in February 1970.
He graduated in Pure Mathematics from the University of Coimbra (1992), with a grade of 19, and received his PhD in Mathematical Analysis from the University of Lisbon (1999). He was an Erasmus student at the Universiteit Gent (1992), studied at the École Polytechnique (Paris, 1995), with a grant from the European Science Foundation, and did a Post-Doctorate at Northwestern University (Chicago, 1999). He took the Habilitation exams in Mathematics at the University of Coimbra (2005) and was unanimously approved. He has been a Full Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Coimbra since January 2009. Since August 2022, he has been Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), in Saudi Arabia.
He is the author of the books, The Method of Intrinsic Scaling (Springer, 2008) e The Infinity-Laplacian: from AMLEs to Machine Learning (IMPA, 2023)and of around 70 scientific articles in equations with non-linear partial derivatives. He was principal investigator of five research projects evaluated and funded by FCT. He has organized several scientific events in Portugal and abroad, has been a guest speaker at around three dozen international conferences, and has carried out numerous editorial and review jobs. He was associate editor of the journal Nonlinear Analysis: Theory, Methods & Applications [2013-2020]. He has supervised six PhD students and ten post-doctoral students and has also served on several PhD juries at foreign universities (in Germany, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France and Italy). He has taught advanced courses at IMPA (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), the Technical University of Helsinki (Finland), the University of Florence (Italy), the Federal University of Ceará (Fortaleza, Brazil), KAUST (Saudi Arabia) and Seoul National University (South Korea). He was a Special Visiting Researcher for Brazil’s Science without Borders Program [2013-2015].
He was a member of the National Council for Science and Technology [2012-2015] and the Scientific Council for Exact Sciences and Engineering of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) [2013-2016], President of the Mathematics Center of the University of Coimbra (CMUC) [2007-2011] and Vice-President of the Portuguese Mathematical Society (SPM) [2006-2008]. He was a member of the Board of the International Mathematics Center (CIM) [2004-2008] and of the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra [2009-2013]. He was a member of the Scientific Coordinating Committee of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s New Talents in Mathematics Program [2000-2021]. He was Director of the CMU|Portugal and UT Austin|Portugal Programs in Mathematics [2014-2018]. He was a member of the FCT evaluation panel for the award of individual PhD and Post-Doctoral scholarships in Mathematics in the 2011 and 2012 competitions and was the panel coordinator for the 2019, 2020 and 2021 competitions. He has chaired several external evaluation committees for mathematics courses within the scope of A3ES – Agência de Avaliação e Acreditação do Ensino Superior (Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Agency). He has evaluated grants and/or projects for, among others, the European Commission (Marie-Curie Fellowships), the European Research Council (Starting Grants), the Academy of Finland, the Serrapilheira Institute and the Latvian Council of Science.
He is a Corresponding Member of the Class of Sciences (Mathematics Section) of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon (since January 2020) and Editor-in-Chief of Portugaliae Mathematica. He was awarded the Gulbenkian Research Stimulus Program (1998) and received, ex-aequo, the José Anastácio da Cunha Prize from SPM (2002). He won the gold medal in the National Mathematical Olympiad (1988).
