On the 4th of March 2015, the Minister of Science and Higher Education Lena Kolarska-Bobińska appointed prof. dr hab. Zbigniew Błocki as the new director of the National Science Centre.
Prof. dr hab. Zbigniew Błocki’s bio
Since 1990 he has been affiliated with the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Jagiellonian University, where he took his doctoral degree in 1995. In 1999, as a recipient of the Fulbright senior grant, he worked at Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2001 he resided at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and in 2002 he carried out research for three months at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. In the years 2006 and 2013 he was a visiting professor at Indiana University. He gave a number of lectures at such locations as Princeton, Harvard, Columbia University, University of Hong Kong, Peking University, Fudan University, Nagoya, Tel Aviv, Grenoble, The Indian Institute of Science – Bangalore, Uppsala, Tor Vergata, Vienna, Purdue University, Australian National University, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu – Paris.
In the years 2010 through 2015 he was a member of the Council of the National Science Centre, and between 2010 and 2013 – of the Board of the Polish Mathematical Society. Currently, he is a member of the scientific board of the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and of the Committee of Ethics of the European Mathematical Society. In the years 2011-2012 he held the office of director of the Institute of Mathematics, Jagiellonian University; he also served as deputy to the president of the Organising Committee of the 6th European Congress of Mathematics in Krakow, in 2012. For a number of years he has been a member of the scientific committee and the main coordinator of the series of lectures in memoriam Stanisław Łojasiewicz, at Jagiellonian University. In the period between 2010 and 2015 he coordinated the research project Geometry and Topology in Physical Models, as part of the International PhD Projects Programme operated by the Foundation for Polish Science. He is involved, as Principal Investigator, in the project Pluripotential Theory and dbar under the Ideas Plus Programme.
He has received numerous prestigious state and academic awards from such bodies and institutions as the Polish Mathematical Society or Jagiellonian University.