Robert J. Zimmer

Robert J. Zimmer is president of the University of Chicago, since 2006. He has spoken and written extensively about the importance of free expression and open discourse on college campuses. A mathematics faculty member, Zimmer was previously chair of the Mathematics Department, deputy provost, and vice president for research.

He chairs the boards of Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi Research Alliance (operator of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), and the Marine Biological Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2017, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni awarded Zimmer the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education.

The author of multiple books and more than 80 research articles, Zimmer's primary intellectual interests include ergodic theory, Lie groups, discrete subgroups, differential geometry, transformation groups, group representations, foliations and related questions of geometry, group theory and analysis. He has served on the editorial boards of Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Geometriae Dedicata and Journal of Geometric Analysis, and is series editor of the Chicago Lectures in Mathematics Series.