Colleagues of Michael Vogelius helped him celebrate his 60th birthday earlier this summer at a conference titled Applied Analysis for the Materials Sciences, held at CIRM (Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques) in Luminy, France. At the time Vogelius might have been thinking of a different way to mark the year, having put his name in play for the soon-to-be-open position of director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. As this issue of
SIAM News went to press, NSF announced that Vogelius will become the new director of DMS in January 2014, succeeding Sastry Pantula, who steps down in September.
On arriving at NSF, he will join in planning for the fiscal year 2016 budget, which will then be in the very early stages. The FY 2015 budget will have been largely finalized, and Congress should have completed appropriations for 2014. The most important task, he says, will be to insure strong support for the core programs of DMS, while at the same time trying to motivate the mathematical community to participate in special initiatives considered of high national interest.
Vogelius joined the mathematics department of Rutgers University in 1989, and has been a Board of Governors Professor there since 1998. His work will be familiar to many in the SIAM community from his participation in the materials science conferences. A former editor of SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization (1994-2000), he is currently a member of the editorial board of SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis.