Professor Polacik is currently serving as a Full Professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. He is a well known research authority in PDE’s and infinite- dimensional dynamical systems; in particular, he has undertaken significant work on the qualitative properties of parabolic differential equations. Professor Polacik has published more than 85 journal papers, and is the author of the recent graduate level textbook “Propagating Terraces and the Dynamics of Front-like Solutions of Reaction-diffusion Equations on R” and co-author of the textbook “Realization of Vector Fields and Dynamics of Spatially Homogeneous Parabolic Equations” (with Edward Norman Dancer). He has also served as Editor for the journal Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Professor Polacik is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.