CSE 2007: A Snapshot
April 11, 2007
The 2007 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering drew more than 650 people to Costa Mesa, California, February 19�23. If further evidence of active interest in the discipline is needed, the conference supplied that too: About 120 of the participants were students. Shown here are two of the students, each a leader in SIAM activities for some time.
Pearl Flath, introduced to SIAM News last summer by David Keyes as someone "who likes to found SIAM student chapters," is currently working on a PhD in the computational and applied mathematics program at the University of Texas, Austin, where her research on uncertainty quantification for contaminant transport is being supervised by Omar Ghattas. She is the founder and current president of the SIAM student chapter at Austin. Flath was an organizer, with her counterparts in the Rice SIAM student chapter, of the first annual Texas Applied Mathematics Meeting for Students, held the weekend preceding the February SIAM CSE conference. While an undergraduate---at Columbia where she majored in applied math, minored in physics, worked with David Keyes on wildfire research, and received a BA in 2005---Flath founded the Columbia student chapter of SIAM.
Alejandro Cantarero, now a PhD student at UCLA, is a 2005 graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he majored in applied mathematics and computer science. At Boulder, he also applied himself to organization: He was vice president (2003�04) and then president (2004�05) of the SIAM undergraduate student chapter and an organizer of the SIAM Front Range Applied Mathematics Student Conference, a joint effort of several universities in Colorado. (He also reported on the conference for SIAM News, in the May 2005 issue.) Cantarero's research interests include differential equations and numerical methods for PDEs, parallel computing (his undergraduate thesis was titled "Constructing Parallel Algorithms for the Automatic Extraction of Three-Dimensional Cellular Structures from Digital Images Generated Via Electron Microscopy"), and signal processing. He looks forward to becoming active in the SIAM student chapter at UCLA.
