New SIAM Leaders to Take Office in January 2012

December 13, 2011

As of January 1, 2012, SIAM will have three new officers, along with several new and re-elected members of the Board of Trustees and Council. Irene Fonseca, the Mellon College of Science Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, becomes SIAM president-elect, a position she will hold for one year, after which she will begin a two-year term as SIAM president, followed by a year as past president. With a president-elect taking office, the four-year presidential odyssey of SIAM past-president Doug Arnold draws to a close. Current SIAM president Nick Trefethen begins the second year of his term on January 1; aficionados of his column won't want to miss the current installment.

Fonseca, who is director of the Center for Nonlinear Analysis at CMU, works in continuum mechanics, the calculus of variations, nonlinear PDEs, geometric measure theory, and the mathematics of materials and imaging. Alongside a thriving research agenda, she has an extensive record of contributions to the SIAM community, ranging from the science policy committee (of which she has been a member since 2008), two terms on the Council, and many and varied committee memberships. The editors, and readers, of SIAM News are in her debt for most of the articles in this issue of SIAM News; with Hans Kaper and Fadil Santosa, she found time at ICIAM 2011 to "guest edit" what has turned out to be several issues largely devoted to the Vancouver Congress.

Nick Higham
Re-elected to a two-year term as vice president at large is Nick Higham, Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester. A numerical analyst with interests mainly in numerical linear algebra and scientific computing, he has been active in a broad range of SIAM activities. A few highlights: He was a member of the Board of Trustees from 2006 to 2009; he has been a member of the editorial boards of SIMAX and the SIAM Classics book series, and he is the author of four SIAM books. Like Fonseca, he has supported SIAM News as a co-guest-editor-in chief; he has also written articles and served on the editorial board.

Simon Tavener
SIAM's newly elected secretary, Simon Tavener, is a professor of mathematics at Colorado State University. His research interests include numerical analysis and scientific computing, with the emphasis on error estimation and adaptivity for multiphysics problems, and computational biology.

Tavener succeeds Pam Cook of the University of Delaware, who will have served the maximum allowable three terms in the position by the end of 2011; beginning in January, she will put her energy and experience to use as the newly appointed SIAM vice president for publications.

With three spots to fill on the Board of Trustees, SIAM members elected Kathryn Brenan (Aerospace Corporation) and Tamara Kolda (Sandia National Labs) to three-year terms; Mary Ann Horn (Vanderbilt University and the National Science Foundation) was re-elected to a second term.

Rachel Kuske
Newly elected to the SIAM Council with a three-year term beginning January 1 is Rachel Kuske (University of British Columbia); re-elected to the Council are Michele Benzi (Emory University), Bruce Hendrickson (Sandia National Labs), and Thomas Hou (Caltech).

The Board of Trustees, scheduled to meet in Philadelphia the weekend of December 9, will fill seats reserved for appointed members. Updates on the board's choices and other decisions will be reported in upcoming issues of SIAM News.

• See more news from this issue