»President Daniele C. Struppa, Ph.D.

Daniele C. Struppa, Ph.D., was elected 13th president of Chapman University on September 28, 2015 and assumed his duties on September 1, 2016.

Daniele Struppa was born in Milan, Italy on June 25, 1955, the son of Giuseppe Struppa and Emilia Galli Struppa. He earned his laurea in mathematics from the University of Milano, Italy, in 1977, and received his doctorate degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1981. He has received several awards and honors including the Bartolozzi Prize from the Italian Mathematical Union (in 1981), and the Matsumae Medal from the Matsumae International Foundation of Tokyo (1987).

Dr. Struppa’s academic career includes positions at the University of Milano, at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, at the University of Calabria (where he also served as Chairman of the Department of Mathematics for two years), and finally at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. During his period in Virginia, he served as Chairman of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs, and finally (for nine years) as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Struppa joined the Chapman community in 2006 as provost and chief academic officer until July 2007 when he was appointed chancellor. While serving as chancellor, Dr. Struppa has continued in his scholarly research focusing on Fourier analysis and its applications to a variety of problems including the algebraic analysis of systems of differential equations, signal processing, quantum physics, and pattern recognition. As chancellor, his love of learning and teaching has continued to flourish as you will often find him teaching advanced math courses using a ‘flipped classroom’ teaching style. Even as president he will continue to instruct as he says ‘he not only loves teaching,’ but ‘he loves learning from students and considers it critical to his success as university president.’

Dr. Struppa has authored more than 200 refereed publications and is the editor of several volumes. He has edited or co-authored more than ten books, including Bicomplex Holomorphic Functions; Regular Functions of a Quaternionic Variable; Noncommutative Functional Calculus; Analysis of Dirac Systems and Computational Algebra; Fundamentals of Algebraic Microlocal Analysis; and The Fundamental Principle for Systems of Convolution Equations. Currently, two new books are in press. Dr. Struppa’s mathematical endeavors have taken him to many countries in the world. He has lectured extensively in Japan (where he first went to learn algebraic analysis from the Kyoto school), in the Soviet Union (he coauthored a comprehensive article on mean-periodicity in a volume of the Soviet Academy Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences, later translated in English), in Mexico, in China, in Europe (United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Germany, Ukraine, and, of course, Italy).

His up-to-date list of publications can be found on the American Mathematical Society site mathscinet, as well as on google scholar.

Dr. Struppa has been involved, for many years, in a variety of community-oriented activities that he believes is an integral part of his growth as an individual. When serving as Chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University, he became involved with two probation schools, the Sunrise School and the Girls Probation House. He remembers the early morning math session he used to hold with the guests of those facilities as some of his most rewarding moments. Here in California, he has developed a partnership with the Nicholas Academic Center in Santa Ana, which he regularly visits as part of a program that brings Chapman faculty to the students of the center, as well as with Higher Ground, an organization that works with youth at risk in Anaheim, on which board he currently serves. He has served on a number of non-profit boards, including the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville (Virginia), and the Center for Media and Public Policy, and the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), both in Washington D.C.

During his spare time, Dr. Struppa has traveled around the world to climb mountains. He has climbed in the Andes (especially in Argentina, where he climbed Aconcagua, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where he proposed to his wife on Cotopaxi), in the European Alps (a special spot in his heart being the climb of Arete du Cosmiques on Mt. Blanc), in the Caucasus (including Mt. Elbrus), in Africa (including Mt. Kilimanjaro), and he attempted Cho Oyu in the Himalayas.

He is married to Dr. Lisa Sparks, who is the founding Dean of the School of Communication and the Foster and Mary McGaw Endowed Professor at Chapman. They live in Irvine with their three girls, Elena, Ariana and Athena. They have one grown son, Alex, who graduated from Chapman with Bachelor of fine arts in Digital arts in 2010, and a daughter-in law, Kaitlin Brnovich Struppa, also a 2010 Chapman alum.