BISO News – Union and Committee News

New DIVERSITAS National Committee Members
Re-organizing under a new Chair, the U.S. National Committee for DIVERSITAS will embark on a program to strengthen the connections to the international DIVERSITAS program and serve as a focal point for biodiversity issues within the National Academy. Sir Peter Crane, the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and Foreign Associate Member of the NAS, has accepted the Chairmanship of the DIVERSITAS Committee. Other Committee members include Rodolfo Dirzo (Stanford University), Mike Donoghue (Yale University), Ann Kinzig (Arizona State University), Thomas E. Lovejoy (H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment), Lynne Parenti (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution), Jorge Soberón (The University of Kansas), James Tiedje (Michigan State University), Cristián Samper (Smithsonian National Museum for Natural History), and Stephen Polasky (University of Minnesota). Harold Mooney (Stanford University) serves as an Ex officio member of the committee in his capacity of the DIVERSITAS Scientific Steering Committee co-chair.

Responsibility for DIVERSITAS has also shifted within BISO, as Maggie Goud Collins is the new program officer for the committee. The first meeting of the new committee will be held on July 23 in Chicago.

2007 IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program
The 2007 Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which began on June 4 in Laxenburg, Austria, will offer 51 graduate students from around the world the opportunity to work on projects related to their thesis work, under the mentorship of a senior researcher at IIASA. This year’s program includes twelve students from U.S. institutions, ten of whom are being funded by the BISO’s U.S. Committee for IIASA, which carries out the National Academies’ responsibilities as the U.S. adhering body for IIASA. The funds are part of the NSF Grant number 0533957, which funds the Committee’s activities.

The twelve U.S. participants come from ten different institutions nationwide and were selected by IIASA based on their academic credentials and the relevance of their proposed research projects to the activities underway at IIASA. Alumni of the YSSP program frequently cite it as a critical juncture in their graduate careers in that it offers an unparalleled opportunity for students to work in an international setting and form a global network of peers interested in applying their research to issues of global change. View the list of all 51 YSSP participants, including contact information and the IIASA projects with which they will be working. Applications for the 2008 program will be available on the IIASA Website in mid-October. Learn more about the Young Scientists Summer Program.

Focusing on Global Development: IIASA’s 35^th Anniversary Conference
In honor of its 35th anniversary, IIASA will convene a conference entitled Global Development: Science and Policies for the Future on November 14-15, 2007, at the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna, Austria. Presentations and discussions will focus on the current trends in global development and explore the human and environmental realities of the coming decades that should—and must—drive policymaking today on the subject of Research and Policies for Global Development. Conference sessions will focus on questions relevant to global development policy debates in the coming decades, which IIASA is positioned to play a decisive role in analyzing. Review more information on the Conference IIASA’s Website. Attendance is by invitation only; if you are interested in attending, please contact IIASA Program Officer Maggie Goud Collins (mcollins@nas.edu).

IIASA Organizes Global Energy Assessment
IIASA, along with other international partners, recently launched a Global Energy Assessment (GEA), a major new initiative that seeks to redefine the global energy policy agenda. The GEA aims to make a significant contribution to future energy policy and decision making by developing integrated solutions to ameliorate existing and emerging threats associated with energy security. Other issues of focus include access to modern energy services for development and poverty alleviation; local, regional and global environmental impacts; and lack of investment in energy infrastructure and technology.

The U.S. Committee for IIASA has been working closely with the GEA organizers to ensure that the views of U.S. agencies and organizations involved in energy policy are well represented at every phase of the planning and execution of the assessment. In late March, two of the leaders of the Assessment, Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Ged Davis spent several days in Washington discussing the GEA with a wide range of potential collaborators and users. Nakicenovic, the originator of the initiative, is the head of IIASA's Energy Program and Davis, who along with Jose Goldemberg serves as co-President of the GEA, was until recently the managing director of the World Economic Forum at Davos, after more than thirty years of working on scenario development at Royal Dutch Shell.

U.S. Committee member Robert Corell, Director of the Global Change Program at the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, & the Environment, has prepared a proposal that will provide an anchor at the Heinz Center for the U.S. participation in the GEA. Corell also serves as a member of the GEA Council, which will oversee the planning and execution of the study.

Supporting Optics Education
The U.S. Advisory Committee for the International Commission on Optics (USAC/ICO) joined its three sponsoring societies (SPIE, OSA, and IEEE-LEOS) in supporting the 2007 Education and Training in Optics and Photonics (ETOP) conference. Held June 3-5 in Ottawa, Canada in conjunction with the much larger Photonics North conference, the meeting brought together over 100 individuals representing 5 continents. With funding provided by the National Science Foundation, the USAC-ICO was able to support 17 U.S. researchers and educators who would not otherwise have been able to attend. Almost all the sponsored Americans presented sessions at the conference. Topics included biophotonics, fiber optics, nanotechnology, instruments, teaching methods, K-12 education, college courses, and international collaborations. One very meaningful session highlighted the many achievements and contributions of former ICO president and USAC/ICO member, Arthur Guenther.

The first ETOP plenary session focused on the UNESCO-led Active Learning in Optics and Photonics (ALOP) program. Supported by the USAC/ICO, its sponsoring societies, and several other organizations, the 5-day ALOP workshops bring together teacher participants from a developing region and establish a consortium for furthering the use of innovative teaching-learning strategies in physics classrooms. Specifically, the workshops seek to:

Three ALOP workshops are being held in 2007 in Tanzania, Brazil, and Mexico. The USAC/ICO is sponsoring presenters David Sokoloff and Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan at these workshops.

USNC/Math Instruction Sponsors Speakers at NCTM Annual Meeting
In line with its objective to foster projects in areas of importance in international mathematical sciences, the U.S. National Commission on Mathematics Instruction (USNC/MI) sponsored three presentations at the 2007 Annual Meeting and Exposition of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) in Atlanta, Georgia, March 21-24, 2007. Ubiratan D’Ambrosio (Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil), examined how classroom practices mesh with theoretical frameworks of mathematics education in his presentation Mathematics Education and the Teaching of Mathematics: Mutual Implications. Paul Cobb (Vanderbilt University) led a discussion on Placing Students’ Learning at the Center of Mathematics Teaching, which focused on the challenges related to fostering students’ reasoning while achieving a mathematical agenda. Skip Fennell, USNC/MI chair and NCTM president, along with fellow USNC/MI member Rick Scott chaired a panel discussion providing an overview of the USNC/MI’s initiatives and forthcoming projects involving international mathematics education.

USNC/Math Active Worldwide
As reported in the last BISO newsletter, the USNC/Math has made interactions with mathematicians in developing countries a top priority. For several years, the committee has worked hard to develop the contacts necessary to support meaningful projects and collaborations. Funding from the National Science Foundation allowed the committee to support a number of successful projects.

Model Theory Workshop in Columbia: The USNC/Math supported a workshop in model theory in Villa de Leyva, Colombia on March 28-30, 2007. The workshop consisted of three coordinated lectures on o-minimality offered by Professors David Marker (University of Illinois at Chicago), Sergei Starchenko (University of Notre Dame), and Charles Steinhorn (Vassar College). Two problem sessions, based on the material covered in the lectures, were led by Colombian mathematicians. The workshop was followed by a research meeting on o-minimality on March 31st and April 1st. The three main themes discussed were model theory of the field of real numbers, general o-minimality, and algebra and analysis in o-minimality.
USNC/Math Co-Sponsors Lecture Series in Turkey: A three-part lecture series was coordinated between the Turkish Mathematical Association, the Istanbul Center for Mathematical Sciences (IMBM), and the USNC/Math. Professor Dan Goldston, the first lecturer, was chosen for his previous work with Turkish mathematicians. During his week stay in October 2006, he gave a lecture and held a workshop entitled ”Small Gaps between Primes. Professor Edriss Titi from the University of California, Irvine and the Weizmann Institute, Israel gave two talks in Istanbul in April 2007. He spoke about the global regularity results for Navier-Stokes equations and its close relative Primitive equations. Dr. Titi also held an informal meeting with the graduate students about the new trends in Mathematics such as Biomathematics, Computational Science and Climate Modelling. The final visitor was Professor Charles Akemann from UC Santa Barbara, who participated in a workshop focused on the Kadison-Singer extension problem.
USNC/Math Supports Two-Week Course in Benin: Through the support of USNC/Math, Lesley and Robert Sibner led a two-week course in Benin at the Institut de Mathematiques et de Sciences Physiques (IMSP). Their lectures and workshops covered harmonic functions, differential forms, point singularities, and vector bundles with compact transformation groups. Other topics discussed included the Yang-Mills Model, the nonlinear Born-Infeld Model, magnetic monopoles, and the existence theorem of Taubes.
Three-Part Lecture Series Concludes: Held between November 2006 and January 2007, a three-part lecture series supported jointly by the USNC/Math and CINVESTAV in Mexico featured lectures by Frederick Cohen, Dennis Sullivan, and Bernd Sturmfels.