Board of Advisors

Members

Laura Appenzeller

Laura Appenzeller is the Executive Director of the University of Illinois Research Park and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is active in numerous regional organizations including serving as the current board chair of the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition; Hope Chicago board; the board of the Champaign County Economic Development Corporation; and she is a member of the Economic Club of Chicago, and ChicagoNEXT Council of World Business Chicago.

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Noah Brenowitz

Noah Brenowitz is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA. He completed a PhD in 2017 in Atmospheric-ocean Science and Mathematics at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences with Andrew Majda as his Advisor. While there he developed a strong background in applied mathematics. Since then he has focused on improving climate models with machine learning with Christopher Bretherton, first as a Moore/Sloan & WRF Innovation in Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington (UW) and then later at Vulcan and AI2. Noah has led the publication of several foundational papers in this burgeoning field. He enjoys spending his free-time in the beautiful mountains of the Pacific Northwest during all seasons of the year.

Chid Apte

Dr. Chid Apte currently serves as Chair of the IBM Research Mathematical Sciences Council in the Exploratory Sciences program at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Chid has extensive experience over many decades as a research scientist and technical leader in the data analytics and applied math areas. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University, and a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Bombay).

C. Allen Butler

C. Allen Butler is President and CEO of Daniel H. Wagner Associates, Inc., an operations research and software development company. He specializes in multi-sensor data fusion, resource optimization, mission planning and optimal search. He is an elected Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He is Treasurer of the Mathematical Association of America.

T. Tony Cai

T. Tony Cai is the Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School and Professor in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Science Graduate Group at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Vice Dean for China Initiatives at the Wharton School. He works in high-dimensional statistics, statistical machine learning, functional data analysis, statistical decision theory, and nonparametric function estimation. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2006) and the recipient of the 2008 COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.

Adrian Coles

Adrian Coles is an Associate Director of Biostatistics at Bristol Myers Squibb. He is a collaborative researcher who specializes in the design and implementation of clinical trials and the interpretation of clinical trial data to facilitate the assessment of benefit/risk for promising pharmaceutical innovations. He is also a subject matter expert in diversity, equity, and inclusion and chairs the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Minorities in Statistics as well as the organization’s Antiracism Taskforce. His awards include the Karen S. Pieper Teaching and Fellowship Support Award (2018) for collaborative research and contributions to the Duke Clinical Research Institute’s Research Fellowship Training Program and the Top 100 Lilly Innovator Award (2019) for complex and innovative trial designs.

Juan de Pablo

Juan de Pablo is the Vice President for National Laboratories, Science Strategy, Innovation, and Global Initiatives at the University of Chicago, the Liew Family Professor at the Pritzker School for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, and Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.

Lee DeVille

Lee DeVille is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He works in dynamical systems and stochastic processes, with special focus on systems defined on networks. He was a National Academy of Science Kavli Fellow (2012). Lee received his Ph. D. from Boston University in 2001 and was a postdoc at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Courant Institute before landing at UIUC.

Darrell Duffie

Darrell Duffie is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management and Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He is a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the American Finance Association, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Duffie is a past president of the American Finance Association and chaired the Financial Stability Board’s Market Participants Group on Reference Rate Reform. He is an independent director of the Dimensional Funds, Project Advisor of The G30 Working Group on Digital Currencies, a co-director of the Hoover Institution’s Study of the Global Implications of China’s Central Bank Digital Currency, and a member of the Advisory Council of the Future of Digital Currency Initiative at Stanford University.

Tamara G. Kolda

Tamara Kolda is an independent mathematical consultant under the auspices of her company MathSci.ai based in California. She specializes in numerical methods for tensor decompositions and other applications in data science. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Pierre-Louis Lions

Pierre-Louis Lions holds the Chair on Partial Differential Equations and Applications at the College de France. He works in partial differential equations, mean field games, stochastic processes, and big data modeling. He received the 1994 Fields Medal and is a Commander in France’s Legion of Honor (2014). His international reputation has earned him memberships in the national academies of sciences in Brazil, Italy, Argentina, and Chile.

Steve Sain

Steve Sain is a Senior Principal Data Scientist and Senior Director, Geospatial and Data Sciences, at Jupiter Intelligence. Jupiter provides data and analytics services to better predict and manage risks from weather and sea level rise, storm intensification and changing temperatures caused by medium- to long-term climate change. Steve is an experienced data science leader and applied statistician who has worked across academics, national laboratories, and industry. He has led data science research and development teams and he is a former head of the Geophysical Statistics Project in the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. Steve has long worked at the intersection of climate research and applied statistics, including a focus on spatial methods for large datasets, extremes, uncertainty quantification, and climate risk analytics. Steve is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and serves on the steering committee for the ASA’s newly formed Caucus of Industry Representatives. He is an affiliate faculty in the University of Colorado’s Department of Applied Mathematics and serves on the advisory board for the department’s professional MS in Applied Mathematics. Steve also volunteers on his town’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Sustainability.

Brooke Shipley

Brooke Shipley is Professor and Head of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a former director of UIC Women in Science and Engineering System Transformation. She works in algebraic topology, homotopy theory, commutative algebra, and derived algebraic geometry. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2015) and a 2002 recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship.

Suzanne L. Weekes

Suzanne L. Weekes is the Executive Director of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Weekes’ research work has been in numerical methods for differential equations including applications to spatio-temporal composites and cancer growth. She has also focused on initiatives connecting the academic mathematics community to mathematics and statistics work in business, industry, and government. She co-directs the national PIC Math (Preparation for Industrial Careers in Mathematical Sciences) Program, and she is on the Board of Governors of TPSE Math (Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics). She is a founding co-director of the MSRI-UP (Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Undergraduate Program).

Weekes is also Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and former Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies. She is the recipient of the Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America, and the Humphreys Award for Mentoring from the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Karen Willcox

Karen Willcox is the Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences, and the Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems at the University of Texas at Austin. She works in multi-fidelity uncertainty quantification and adaptive reduced models. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 2017 she was appointed a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

Patrick Wolfe

Board of Advisors Chair

Patrick Wolfe is the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of Science and the Miller Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at Purdue University, and a trustee of the Alan Turing Institute. He works in modelling and inference for graphs and networks, statistical imaging and image processing, time series and time-frequency analysis, audio signal processing, and acoustic modelling. He is a Royal Society University Research Fellow from University College London and a 2009 recipient of the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Eric Zaslow

Eric Zaslow is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Northwestern University. He works in symplectic geometry, mirror symmetry, mathematical physics, and string theory. He was a Simons Fellow in 2012-2013 and a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship (2000).