Professor Barry Green, the former Head of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University, joined AIMS as its new director from 1 April. Barry’s undergraduate and graduate training was at the University of Cape Town, where he completed his PhD in 1984. Following this he was a lecturer in the Stellenbosch Mathematics Department before spending ten years as a research scientist at the University of Heidelberg, where he completed the Habilitation degree in 1995.

In 1996 he returned to South Africa and has helped build a research group at Stellenbosch University with established international collaborators and specialists in the field of arithmetic algebraic geometry. He has been closely involved with the growth of AIMS since its founding in 2003 and in promoting mathematics in Africa as editor of the mathematics journal Quaestiones Mathematicae and now on the editorial board of Afrika Mathematika. His research interests are in algebra and number theory as well as its computational applications and in 2007 he received the South African Mathematical Society’s award for research distinction.