Membership Biographies

C. David Levermore, University of Maryland Chair Dr. Levermore is a professor in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University. He has served in visiting positions at the University of Paris, University of Toulouse, Kyoto University, Institute Henri Poincare, and at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He has served on the External Advisory Panel to NSF’s VIGRE Program, the External Advisory Committee to the Center for Nonlinear Studies for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and on the SIAM Science Policy Committee. Earlier in his career, he spent a decade at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, engaged in research into advanced methods of computational science and engineering.

Massoud Amin, University of Minnesota. Dr. Amin is director of the Center for the Development of Technological Leadership and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus. His research focuses on models of the dynamics of national critical infrastructures, particularly to understand their resilience and security. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota in March 2003, for five years Dr. Amin held positions of increased responsibility including area manager of infrastructure security, grid operations/planning, and energy markets at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California. In the aftermath of the 9/11, he directed all security-related research and development at EPRI, including the Infrastructure Security Initiative (ISI) and Enterprise Information Security (EIS). He has served as manager of mathematics and information science at EPRI, where he led strategic research in modeling, simulation, optimization, and adaptive control of national infrastructures for energy, telecommunication, transportation, and finance. Dr. Amin is the author or co-author of more than 120 research papers, is the editor of seven collections of manuscripts, and serves on the editorial boards of four academic journals. He holds B.S. (cum laude) and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in systems science and mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tanya Styblo Beder, SBCC. Ms. Beder is Chairman of SBCC with over 20 years of experience in the global capital markets. Ms. Beder founded and served as President of SBCC from 1987 to 1994, returning as Chairman in 2006. During the interim, Ms. Beder held two senior positions in the asset management industry. From 2004 to 2006 she was CEO of Tribeca Global Management LLC, Citigroup's $2.6 billion dollar multi-strategy hedge fund and from 1999 to 2004 she was Managing Director of Caxton Associates LLC, a $10 billion investment management firm located in New York City. At Caxton, Ms. Beder built the Strategic Quantitative Investment Division focused on systems-based trading across equities, fixed income, commodities, and currencies. At Tribeca, she built a global hedge fund that traded across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities, credit, convertibles, merger arbitrage and distressed debt around the world with offices in Singapore, London and New York. During her tenure, Absolute Return awarded the prestigious Institutional Investment Manager of the Year Award. Prior to her senior roles in the asset management industry, she served as President of Capital Market Risk Advisors and was a Vice President of The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse) where she focused on mergers and acquisitions in London and New York and then on mortgage-backed securities, derivatives trading and fixed income research. Ms. Beder is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Financial Engineers where she co-chairs its Investor Risk Committee. From 1998 through 2003 Ms. Beder was Chairman of the Association. Euromoney named Ms. Beder one of the top 50 women in finance around the world. In academia she is on the Advisory Board of Columbia University's Financial Engineering Program and is an appointed Fellow of the International Center for Finance at Yale. Ms. Beder has taught numerous courses on the adjunct faculty of the Yale University's School of Management, Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and Financial Engineering and the New York Institute of Finance. She also serves on the National Board of Mathematics and their Applications. She has appeared as an expert before the United States Congressional Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance regarding derivatives and leverage, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development regarding risk in the global financial landscape, IOSCO regarding valuations, the U.S. Senate Special Committee regarding the Year 2000 Technology Problem and the World Bank and IMF regarding private equity and hedge funds. Ms Beder was an author of the Risk Standards for Institutional Investors and Institutional Investment Managers and has written numerous articles in the financial area that have been published by The Journal of Portfolio Management, The Financial Analysts Journal, The Harvard Business Review, The Journal of Financial Engineering, Probus Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, and Simon & Schuster. Ms. Beder holds a M.B.A. in finance from Harvard University and a B.A. in mathematics from Yale University.

Marsha Berger, New York University. Dr. Berger is a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences with an interest in computer science, numerical analysis, and applied mathematics. Her interdisciplinary research deals in scientific computing with an application to fluid dynamics. She works closely with aerodynamicists at NASA. Professor Berger is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. Among her many honors are the NASA Software of the Year Award, the NYU Sokol Faculty Award in the Sciences, the NSF Faculty Award for Women, and the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. She is currently on the Board of Governors of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. Professor Berger earned her B.S. in mathematics at SUNY-Binghamton, and an M.S. in computer systems and a Ph.D. in numerical analysis at Stanford University.

Philip Bernstein, Microsoft Corporation. Dr. Bernstein is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Professor of Computer Science at University of Washington. He is a leading figure in field of software design to manage data. In recent years, he has focused on metadata management—e.g., manipulation of schemas that describe databases, software interfaces, system configurations, object models, and presentation layout—to reduce the programming effort needed for such tasks as data translation, schema evolution, data integration, cataloging, and lineage tracing. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and treasurer and a member of the board of the Computing Research Association. He holds a B.S. in engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. in computer science from University of Toronto.

Patricia Brennan, University of Wisconsin. Dr. Brennan is Moehlman Bascom Professor at the School of Nursing and College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Brennan's research is in the area of nursing informatics, and she examines ways to use the Internet, home-based computer systems, and specialized information resources to promote self-care and disease management skills among patients and their family caregivers. She is currently leading a project that brings together leading experts in data mining and technical optimization to improve the planning and development of regional health information organizations, part of the emerging national health information infrastructure (NHII). She earned a Ph.D. and an M.S. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, an M.S. in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.S. in nursing from the University of Delaware. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine.

Gunnar Carlsson is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. His research is in algebraic topology, algebraic K-theory, and homotopy theory. He applies his research through Stanford’s project on Topological Methods in Scientific Computing, Statistics, and Computer Science, a multi-disciplinary effort to develop flexible topological methods and software to allow the analysis of data that are difficult to analyze using classical linear methods. Data obtained by sampling from highly curved manifolds or singular algebraic varieties in Euclidean space are typical examples. Important goals include the identification, location, and classification of qualitative features of the data set, such as the presence of corners, edges, cone points, etc. and the use of homology applied to canonically defined blowups and tangent complexes to distinguish between two-dimensional shapes in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Prof. Carlsson received his PhD from Stanford in 1976.

Brenda Dietrich is Director of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Her research includes work in manufacturing modeling and scheduling, inventory management, transportation logistics, mathematical programming, and combinatorial optimization. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IE/MS) at Northwestern University, a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for both IMA (University of Minnesota) and DIMACS (Rutgers), a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and has served on the Board of INFORMS. She is the holder of ten patents, is author or co-author of numerous publications, and co-editor of the book Mathematics of the Internet: E-Auction and Markets. Dr. Dietrich joined IBM Research in 1984. She holds a BS in Mathematics from UNC, and received a Ph.D. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University. She was an invitee to the 2006 Frontiers of Engineering conference. She is current President of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS).

Debra Elkins is with the Quantitative Research & Analytics Division of the Allstate Insurance Company in Northbrook, Illinois. Her research interests include risk modeling for enterprise operations, manufacturing and supply chain vulnerability analysis and disruption consequence modeling, decision-making under uncertainty, computational issues in stochastic processes, applied probability and statistics, and enterprise-scale simulation. Dr. Elkins has served as an industry technical expert for the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation, and she has briefed the U.S. National Defense University/ Industrial College of the Armed Forces on global manufacturing and supply chain risks. Dr. Elkins received a B.S. in Mathematical Physics from Sweet Briar College in Virginia, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering–Operations Research from Texas A&M University.

John Geweke, University of Iowa. Dr. Geweke is chair in Economic Theory at the Tippie School of Business at the University of Iowa. A fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Statistical Association, he is an expert in time series and Bayesian econometric methods, with applications in macroeconomics and labor economics. Prof. Geweke holds a B.S. from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota.

Darryll Hendricks, UBS Investment Bank. Dr. Hendricks is Managing Director and Global Head of Quantitative Risk Control at UBS Investment Bank. Previously, he had been with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York rising to the position of Senior Vice President in bank supervision. In that latter capacity, he was also a prime representative of the U.S. central banking community to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision at the Bank for International Settlements, which has instituted risk-based protocols for bank regulation worldwide over the past decade. He also served on the Basel Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems. Dr. Hendricks is a leading figure in risk-based banking regulation and in financial risk management more generally. He holds a Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.

John E. Hopcroft, Cornell University is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics, Dept. of Computer Science, at Cornell University. Previously, he was the Joseph Silbert Dean of the College of Engineering at Cornell. Dr. Hopcroft's research centers on the study of information capture and access. This includes the study of large graphs, spectral analysis of structures, clustering and queries. He has also been involved in the theoretical aspects of computing, especially analysis of algorithms, formal languages, automata theory, and graph algorithms. Dr. Hopcroft is the co-author of five books, the editor for Algorithmica and Journal of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS), and is a member of numerous scientific associations. In 1996, he received the prestigious A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He graduated from Seattle University in 1961 and received his PhD from Stanford University in 1964.

Karen Kafadar of the University of Colorado at Denver received her B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University, her MS in Statistics from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Statistics from Princeton University under the direction of John W. Tukey. In addition to working in academia, Dr. Kafadar has worked as a statistician for the National Bureau of Standards, the Hewlett Packard Company, and the National Cancer Institute. These positions have allowed her to apply her statistical research to problems in the physical sciences, engineering, and the health sciences. In all of these application areas, common themes are robustness to classical assumptions often made for statistical procedures, characterization of sources of uncertainty, and insightful statistical graphical displays of the results. Dr. Kafadar is the author of over 50 journal articles, a member of numerous scientific associations, and has advised 10 M.A. and Ph.D. students. She served on the NRC committee on the Scientific Assessment of Bullet Lead Elemental Composition and is a current member of CNSTAT and of the NRC Committee to Identify the Needs of the Forensic Science Community.

Charles M. Lucas, American International Companies is Global Head of Market Risk Management at AIG Corp., a financial services firm, where he heads their quantitative finance group. Prior to joining AIG in the mid-1990s, he was at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, from which he retired as a Senior Vice President. At the FRBNY he created and managed the organization’s Capital Markets unit. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jill P. Mesirov is Chief Informatics Officer at the Broad Institute, a collaborative research institute of Harvard and MIT, where she directs the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Organization. She is also an adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University. Dr. Mesirov is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering, and business applications. Her current research interest is computational biology with a focus on algorithms and analytic methodologies for pattern recognition and discovery with applications to cancer genomics, genome analysis and interpretation, and comparative genomics. She came to the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now part of the Broad Institute, in 1997 from IBM, where she was manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization. Before joining IBM in 1995, she was director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation for 10 years. She has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley, the Institute for Defense Analyses' Center for Communications Research in Princeton, and as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society. Mesirov is a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a member of review committees for the DOE’s Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories, and the Board of Directors of the International Society of Computational Biology. She has also served as a member of the Biology and Environmental Research Advisory Committee of the DOE, president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, trustee of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, trustee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and chair of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. She is a fellow of the AAAS and serves on numerous academic and corporate scientific advisory and journal editorial boards. Dr. Mesirov received her A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics and Ph.D. in mathematics from Brandeis University.

Andrew Odlyzko is Director of the interdisciplinary Digital Technology Center, holds an ADC Professorship, and is an Assistant Vice President for Research at the University of Minnesota. Prior to assuming that position in 2001, he devoted 26 years to research and research management at Bell Telephone Laboratories, AT&T Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs, as that organization evolved and changed its name. He has written over 150 technical papers in computational complexity, cryptography, number theory, combinatorics, coding theory, analysis, probability theory, and related fields, and has three patents. He has an honorary doctorate from Univ. Marne la Vallee and serves on editorial boards of over 20 technical journals, as well as on several advisory and supervisory bodies. He has managed projects in diverse areas, such as security, formal verification methods, parallel and distributed computation, and auction technology. In recent years he has also been working on electronic publishing, electronic commerce, and economics of data networks, and is the author of such widely cited papers as "Tragic loss or good riddance: The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals," "The bumpy road of electronic commerce," "Paris Metro Pricing for the Internet," "Content is not king," and "The history of communications and its implications for the Internet." He may be known best for an early debunking of the myth of Internet traffic doubling every three or four months.

Donald Saari (NAS) is Professor of Economics and Mathematics at the University of California at Irvine, where he also directs the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. His 2001 election to the NAS carries the citation “Saari has been instrumental in applying chaos theory and mathematical principles to explain voting outcomes, galaxy formation, and economic dynamics. He showed that much accepted wisdom about elections is highly flawed. He also elucidated some of the complex considerations that need to be factored into economic analyses.” His broad interests, and especially his strengths in the behavioral sciences and in complexity, will help the BMSA as it explores topics related to complex systems, risk, and social sciences. He recently finished a term on the Mathematical Sciences Education Board.

J.B. Silvers is the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of Health Systems Management at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. He serves as Faculty Director of the Health Systems Management Center and holds a joint appointment in epidemiology with the School of Medicine. His articles in financial management and health services have been published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Medical Care, Health Services Research and many others. Prof. Silvers currently serves on the board of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and their finance and audit committee, Nursing Advisory Council and Work Group on Quality & Payment Alignment (Vice Chair). Formerly he served as a Commissioner on the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission (ProPAC, the predecessor of MedPAC), as well as other state and federal commissions. He also has been CEO of a health plan and Senior Associate Dean of the Weatherhead School of Management. He earned his Ph.D. in 1971 from Stanford University.

George Sugihara, University of California at San Diego George Sugihara (Ph.D., Princeton) is a theoretician at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who has worked in a variety of fields, including algebraic topology, quantitative finance, and more recently fisheries and neurobiology. His research is broadly focused on developing novel ways for probing complex data to more fully understanding natural systems. Some specific research areas include landscape ecology, food-web structure, species abundance patterns, conservation biology, atmospheric science and neurobiology. One of his most interdisciplinary contributions involves work developed with Lord Robert May of Oxford University concerning methods of forecasting nonlinear and chaotic systems. This work took him to the arena of investment banking where he took a five-year leave from academe to become a Managing Director for Deutsche Bank. There he made a successful application of these theoretical methods to forecast erratic market behavior. He is currently investigating the application of these methods to fisheries, and is interested in introducing financial derivatives instruments as a means of risk abatement and to help rationalize the fishing industry toward sustainability. A former holder of the John Dove Isaacs Chair of Natural Philosophy at SIO/UCSD, Sugihara is recipient of various international awards, and is currently a Professor at Scripps and an Associate at the Neurosciences Research Institute. Web site: http://sio.ucsd.edu/Profile/?who=gsugihara

Lai-Sang Young is a professor of mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University. Her research is in dynamical systems: geometric and ergodic theory, applications, and connections to probability and mathematical physics. She received her B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1973 and her M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1978) degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. Before coming to NYU, she taught at Northwestern University, Michigan State University, the University of Arizona, and UCLA. In 1985, she was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an award reserved for individuals within six years of earning the Ph.D. who demonstrate "the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge". In 1993 she was awarded the Ruth Lynn Satter Prize for sustained outstanding research contributions over a five-year period by a female mathematician. She was awarded in 1997 a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and was elected in 2004 as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Young was the 2005 Noether Lecturer for the Association for Women in Mathematics.