Meet the Newest Members of the SIAM Board of Trustees and Council
By Lina Sorg
We are pleased to announce the newest members of the SIAM Board of Trustees and Council, as chosen by SIAM membership in the recent election.
Liliana Borcea (University of Michigan), Jan S. Hesthaven (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), and Esmond G. Ng (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) were elected to the SIAM Board of Trustees. The Board is responsible for overall management of SIAM—including financial aspects like budgets, funds, and investments—and simultaneous consideration of the organization’s professional and scientific policies and objectives.
Elizabeth Cherry (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hans De Sterck (University of Waterloo), Alicia Dickenstein (University of Buenos Aires and CONICET), Laura Grigori (INRIA, France), and Lois Curfman McInnes (Argonne National Laboratory) were elected to the SIAM Council. The Council reviews and formulates SIAM’s scientific policies, monitors the organization’s technical activities, proposes new activities, and recommends actions to the Board when appropriate.
The newly-elected members of the Board and Council began their tenure on January 1, 2021 and will serve through December 31, 2023. Here they share their reactions, ideas, and objectives for their time of service.
SIAM Board of Trustees
Liliana Borcea: “I am honored to serve alongside the distinguished scientists on the SIAM Board. My efforts will focus on increasing the impact and visibility of SIAM and applied mathematics as key players in addressing the ever-growing scope and complexity of problems that are driven by rapidly-developing technological discoveries and an explosion of data. I would also like SIAM to play an even stronger role in recruiting and training a versatile generation of scientists that can move easily between disciplines and have impactful careers in academia, research labs, and industry.”
Jan Hesthaven: “Being elected to represent the SIAM community on the Board of Trustees is of course a special privilege and an honor. Building and reinforcing communities of applied, computational, and industrial mathematicians worldwide is as important as ever, and I look forward to contributing to the development of new initiatives that further strengthen SIAM’s global footprint and ensure a lasting impact on our community — with particular emphasis on our younger colleagues.”
Esmond Ng: “I am honored to be re-elected to the SIAM Board of Trustees and appreciate the support from the SIAM community. One challenge that the organization is facing is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the effect on all SIAM conferences — some have been cancelled or rescheduled and others have occurred virtually. Such changes have implications on the operational and financial aspects of SIAM. I will work with the Board to ensure that proper financial and operational decisions are made to overcome these challenges.”
SIAM Council
Elizabeth Cherry: “I am excited and honored to serve on the SIAM Council, and I look forward to helping SIAM maintain its prominence as a global leader and address new challenges and opportunities. I am optimistic that as we continue to find novel ways to connect and share knowledge during the current worldwide pandemic, we will leverage what we learn to accelerate progress on longer-term goals to engage more diverse, cross-disciplinary, and global communities.”
Hans De Sterck: “It is of course a great honour to serve on the SIAM Council. SIAM plays a vital role in our community of applied and computational mathematicians at an international scale. The next few years will be important as the society reacts to the many challenges and opportunities that arise due to the ongoing pandemic and transition into the post-pandemic world. New online and hybrid conference formats will continue to reshape how we network and disseminate our work. Online publishing and the progression towards open access and reproducibility will keep evolving the “publications” cornerstone of the organization, and we’re experiencing a strong momentum towards effecting real change in terms of equity and inclusion for underrepresented groups. The coming years will see many exciting evolutions for SIAM and the field of applied mathematics, and I look forward to contributing to this.”
Alicia Dickenstein: “I am very honored and grateful to have been elected to the SIAM Council and am happy to serve the entire SIAM community. In particular, I look forward to representing the Latin American SIAM community that works outside of the U.S., as well as the relatively small but constantly-growing SIAM Activity Group on Algebraic Geometry.
In addition to the many usual challenges related to funding, underrepresentation, publishing, industry engagement, education, and outreach, we will need to incorporate the experiences and new scientific developments that emerged from the COVID-19 outbreak to overcome the current situation. These efforts will include changing the bad things and improving the good things that we learned from the pandemic.”
Laura Grigori: “I am truly honored to continue serving as a member of the SIAM Council and look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure that the society maintains its prominent status and visibility amongst both our fellow scientists and the general public. My efforts over the next three years will focus on achieving genuine progress on some specific objectives that I particularly value: making SIAM attractive to new generations of researchers and increasing diversity among its members and in the context of specific actions that arise under its auspices.”
Lois Curfman McInnes: “I am indeed honored to serve a second term as a member of the SIAM Council and am grateful to work with the entire SIAM community. A key issue from my perspective involves exploring and expanding the use of technologies to support SIAM community interaction, even while we are socially distanced. Leveraging such technologies could enable the SIAM community to reimagine events and outreach to incorporate hybrid elements that fully support remote connection, thereby expanding participation in ways that we’re only beginning to fathom. Other important topics include broadening interdisciplinary education and research; extending connections among the academic, industrial, and research laboratory segments of the SIAM community; and promoting broader engagement from underrepresented groups.”
The dedication of SIAM’s elected members contributes to the continued success of the society, and SIAM extends its deep appreciation to the entire slate of wonderful candidates and the SIAM members who cast their votes. Thank you for your willingness to serve our community.
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Lina Sorg is the managing editor of SIAM News. |