In April 2020, Prof Mark Wildon was awarded one of the inaugural UK-Lebanon Atiyah Fellowships to visit the Centre for Advanced Mathematical Sciences at the American University of Lebanon.The fellowship was established by the London Mathematical Society in memory of the Fields Medal winning geometer Prof Sir Michael Atiyah (1929-2019). Sir Michael’s father was Lebanese and he retained strong links with Lebanon throughout his life. CAMS was founded in 1999 through the efforts of an international group of scientists with the goal of becoming the premier centre of excellence for research in the mathematical sciences in the Middle East, and itself owes much to the dedicated efforts of Sir Michael who was a frequent visitor. 

     Prof Wildon's main research area is the representation theory of the symmetric and general linear groups. During his planned four month visit to CAMS in 2021 he will work on the geometry of a family of representations of the group of 2-by-2 invertible complex matrices and on the analogous representations defined over number fields and fields of prime characteristic. The characters of these modules are obtained using the plethysm product on symmetric functions: this brings in a rich circle of ideas from algebraic combinatorics and connects two exciting areas of mathematics. Prof Wildon also hopes to visit Beirut Arab University during his stay in Lebanon and to attend and give seminars at both universities. 

     At Royal Holloway Prof Wildon lectures the Channels and Cipher Systems courses for the 3rd year, 4th year and M.Sc. He is Equality and Diversity Champion and firmly believes that everyone deserves a sense of the beauty and power of modern mathematics.