About Jeffrey F. Brock
Jeffrey Brock is the Dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Zhao and Ji Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. His research focuses on low dimensional geometry and topology, particularly hyperbolic geometry. His work William Thurston’s program to understand hyperbolic 3-manifolds led to their geometric classification in joint work with Richard Canary and Yair Minsky. More recently, he has worked to advance geometric and topological methods in analysis of large, complex data sets. He was an undergraduate at Yale, and obtained his Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley, after which he held positions at Stanford and U. Chicago, before moving to the Brown University Math Department, which he Chaired from 2013 to 2017. In 2016 he served as founding Director of Brown’s Data Science Initiative. He moved to Yale in 2018, joining the Mathematics Department and serving as the inaugural Dean of Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008 and was elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2017.
Jeffrey Brock is the Dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Zhao and Ji Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. His research focuses on low-dimensional geometry and topology, particularly on spaces with hyperbolic geometry or negative curvature. His joint work with Richard Canary and Yair Minsky resulted in a solution to the ending lamination conjecture of W. Thurston, resulting in the geometric classification theorem for hyperbolic 3-dimensional manifolds that are topologically finite. More recently, he has worked to understand applications of geometry and topology to the structure of massive and complex data sets and the risks and implications of the increasing use of “black box” algorithms in science and society.
He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Yale University and his Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley, where he studied under Curtis McMullen. After holding postdoctoral positions at Stanford University and the University of Chicago, he came to Brown as an associate professor. He was awarded a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2008 and in 2017 he was elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
He was chair of the Mathematics Department at Brown from 2013-2017 and was the founding Director of Brown’s Data Science Initiative (dsi.brown.edu) launched in 2016. He moved to Yale in 2018, where began as Professor of Mathematics. He became the inaugural Dean of Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in January 2019, overseeing the Science Division of Yale's FAS. In August 2019, he became the Dean of Yale's School of Engineering & Applied Science, adding the engineering departments to his purview. He recently stepped down from his role in the FAS Dean's Office to assume the leadership of the School of Engineering & Applied Science in its new, autonomous form circa July 1, 2022.
He maintains an active interest in music performance; he was the founding bassist of the Vijay Iyer Trio, recording on Iyer’s first two CDs, Memorophilia and Architextures. He and his wife Sarah live in Hamden, CT, with their two boys Elliot and Sam and their daughter Nora.