Banff International Research Station

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Established in 2003, the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) is a North American initiative that addresses the imperatives of collaborative research, of cross-disciplinary synergy, and of intense and prolonged interactions between scientists. BIRS is a unique infrastructure that provides a creative environment for the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the mathematical sciences and their applications. Its programs span almost every aspect of pure, applied, computational and industrial mathematics, statistics, computer science, but also mathematical physics, biology, engineering, economics, finance, psychology and scientific writing. Unlike any other North American institute, the main mode of operation at BIRS is a series of weekly workshops, each hosting 42 researchers in disciplines in which mathematics, computer science and statistics are used in deep and novel ways. There are 48 such workshops each year. In addition, the Station hosts teams of two to four researchers for periods of two weeks to allow collaborative, distraction-free, research and/or to finish major scientific projects. The setting of the Station has also been ideal for summer schools and graduate summer camps, for hosting focused collaborative research groups, and for promoting university-industry interactions. Every year, the station hosts over 2000 researchers from 400 institutions in more than 30 countries who participate in over 60 different programs. BIRS represents a new level of development in North American scientific cooperation as it brought together for the very first time: NSERC, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta Innovation, and Mexico's National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) in a partnership of this scale, providing new and exciting opportunities for North American faculty and students giving them access to their international counterparts at the highest levels and across all mathematical disciplines. The extraordinary response to the opportunities at BIRS leads to extremely high quality competitions with almost 150 proposed activities competing for the 48 available weeks. Besides the 5-day workshops and "Research-in-Teams" programs, BIRS hosted NSF's Focused Research Groups, Canada's Collaborative Research Teams, Department Chairs meetings and other leadership retreats, gatherings for Women in Mathematics, summer schools in emerging areas, students modeling camps, training sessions for Math Olympiads teams, industrial forums, ``ateliers'' in scientific writing, as well as Bridges conferences for Mathematics, Music and Arts. BIRS has led the way in hosting workshops that address science and education issues for aboriginal people. BIRS assumes scientific leadership in moments of crisis (e.g., epidemiological issues of SARS and technological challenges of security) and reacts pro-actively to scientific opportunities and challenges (quantum computing, genomics and fuel cells). BIRS provides cost-effective access to collaborative research: The savings incurred by securing dedicated space for long term use, by achieving a substantial economy of scale, and the advantages obtained by pooling the resources of several organizations, the province of Alberta, and three federal governments, allow BIRS to greatly multiply the opportunities for researchers participating in international collaborative research.