The Banff International Research Station (BIRS) addresses the imperatives of collaborative and cross-disciplinary research with a focus on the mathematical sciences and their vast array of applications in the sciences and in industry. Its modus operandi facilitates intense and prolonged interactions between scientists in a secluded environment, complete with accommo dation and board, and the necessary facilities, for uninterrupted research activities in a variety of formats, all in a magnificent mountain setting. BIRS embraces all aspects of the mathematical, computational and statistical sciences from the most fundamental challenges of pure and applied mathematics, theoretical and applied computer science, statistics, and mathe matical physics, to financial and industrial mathematics, as well as the mathematics of information technology, and the life sciences.Inaugurated in 2003, BIRS is a joint Canada-US-Mexico initiative that came about as the result of a remarkably concerted effort led, at the outset of the new millennium, by the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS, Canada) and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, Berkeley, USA), along with the support of the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Network of Centres of Excellence (MITACS, Canada). 

IASM became the second BIRS Partnership Institutions in 2019. There will be 10 IASM-BIRS workshops in Hangzhou every year.