Robin

Robin says:
I grew up in Berkeley in the 1960's.  Despite what you might think, this makes for a somewhat sheltered childhood. My parents started their own school, which I attended from the age of ten until high school.  Having an insider's view of education from an early age is a striking experience, and it has shaped my views to a large degree.

I became interested in probability theory when Persi Diaconis, a mathematician and former magician, visited M.I.T.  I was supposed to be working on my dissertation in another subject, but found myself working mostly on problems I heard from Persi. I took a year off to travel in the South Pacific, but ended up working on probability theory in various youth hostels and on boats. I came back with most of a thesis, graduated, spent three years on post-doctoral fellowships in Berkeley and Ithaca, one year at Oregon State, most of the 1990's at UW-Madison, three years at Ohio State, and am now at Penn. 

My present mathematical interests are discrete probability models, asymptotics of multivariate generating functions (ACSV), and, as always, the next cute problem that comes along.

You can check personal details on my website or on the family website

https://www.math.upenn.edu/~pemantle/pemutzle.html

They say:

Robin Pemantle joined the Mathematics faculty at Penn in 2003. Before that, he was at Ohio State (1999-2003), Wisconsin (1991-1999) and Oregon State (1990-1991), and before that held an NSF Postdoctoral position at Cornell (1989-1990) and Berkeley (1988-1989).  His Ph.D. is from MIT (1988) under the supervision of Persi Diaconis and his B.A. (1984) is from Berkeley in Pure Mathematics. 

Prior to his employment as a research mathematician he held a job as a mathematics enrichment instructor at Black Pine Circle Day School (1980-1984).