Member Bios

Donald Saari
Chair
Distinguished Professor of Economics and Mathematics at the University of California at Irvine
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..

Gerald G. Brown, Distinguished Professor of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School
He has taught and conducted basic and applied research in optimization theory and optimization-based decision support since 1973, earning awards for both outstanding teaching and research. His military research has been applied by every uniformed service, in areas ranging from strategic nuclear targeting to capital planning. Prof. Brown has been awarded the Rist Prize for military operations research and has been credited with guiding investments of more than a trillion dollars. He has designed and implemented decision support software currently used by two-thirds of the Fortune 50 companies, in areas ranging from vehicle routing to supply-chain optimization. His research appears in scores of open-literature publications and classified reports, many of which are seminal references in the field. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, and a founding director of Insight, Inc., the leading provider of strategic supply-chain optimization-based decision support tools to the private sector.

L. Anthony Cox, Jr., is president of Cox Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in wireless and optical network design and optimization software tools, customer data mining and predictive modeling, and decision and risk analysis technologies. Dr. Cox has a PhD in risk analysis and an S.M. in operations research, both from MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Prior to starting Cox Associates in 1986, he consulted in risk analysis, economics and statistics, operations research, and artificial intelligence at Arthur D. Little, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1987 to 1996, Dr. Cox managed applied research and high-technology product development efforts for US WEST Advanced Technologies in Boulder, Colorado, where he was senior director of advanced communications research, business and engineering modeling, and network architectures. He is currently an honorary full professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Denver, where he lectures on topics in biomathematics, health risk modeling, computational statistics, and machine learning. Dr. Cox is also on the faculties of the Center for Computational Mathematics and the Center for Computational Biology at the University of Colorado at Denver and is clinical professor of preventive medicine and biometrics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, where he teaches and guides graduate research on uncertainty analysis and causation in epidemiological studies. He is on the editorial board of Risk Analysis: An International Journal and is co-editor of the Journal of Heuristics. Dr. Cox was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1992 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012, and was made a lifetime fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis in 1993. In 1994, he was a recipient of the Operations Research Society of America’s prestigious ORSA prize for the best real-world applications of operations research having profound business impact. In addition to hands-on experience and professional activities in telecommunications decision and risk analysis, operations research, artificial intelligence, and applied statistics, Dr. Cox has authored and co-authored more than 100 journal articles and book chapters on advanced aspects of these fields. He holds more than a dozen U.S. and international patents on applications of network optimization, speech recognition, and signal processing technologies in telecommunications.

Brenda Dietrich, 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.

Constantine Gatsonis, Brown University
Dr. Gatsonis joined Brown University in 1995 and became the founding Director of the Center for Statistical Sciences. He is a leading authority on the design and analysis of clinical trials of diagnostic and screening modalities and has extensive involvement in methodologic research in medical technology assessment and in health services and outcomes research. He is Group Statistician of the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN), an NCI-funded collaborative group conducting multi-center studies of diagnostic imaging and image-guided therapy for cancer. In his ACRIN work, Dr. Gatsonis is the chief statistician of the Digital Mammography Imaging Screening Trial (a national study comparing digital to film mammography) and is also the chief statistician for ACRIN’s arm of the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST). Dr Gatsonis was the lead statistician of the International Breast MRI Consortium and of the Radiologic Diagnostic Oncology Group (RDOG). He is the founding editor-in-chief of Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology and serves as a deputy editor of Academic Radiology and a member of the editorial board of Clinical Trials. Dr Gatsonis is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Association for Health Services Research. 

Darryll Hendricks, UBS Investment Bank
Dr. Hendricks is Global Head of Risk Methodology at UBS Investment Bank and a former senior staff member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He joined UBS Investment Bank late in 2005 as Managing Director and Global Head of Quantitative Risk Control after 13 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he rose 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 PhD in public policy from Harvard University.  

Andrew W. Lo, Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering
He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1984. Before joining MIT's finance faculty in 1988, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School as the W.P. Carey Assistant Professor of Finance from 1984 to 1987, and as the W.P. Carey Associate Professor of Finance from 1987 to 1988. He has published numerous articles in finance and economics journals, and has authored several books including The Econometrics of Financial Markets, A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective, and The Evolution of Technical Analysis. He is currently co-editor of the Annual Review of Financial Economics and an associate editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Portfolio Management, and the Journal of Computational Finance. His awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Paul A. Samuelson Award, the American Association for Individual Investors Award, the Graham and Dodd Award, the 2001 IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the CFA Institute's James R. Vertin Award, the 2010 Harry M. Markowitz Award, and awards for teaching excellence from both Wharton and MIT. Andy was a keynote speaker at the Board’s 2009 workshop on technical challenges of regulation of systemic financial risk.

David Maier, Portland State University
Dr. Maier is Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies at Portland State University. Prior to his current position, he was on the faculty at SUNY-Stony Brook and Oregon Graduate Institute. He has spent extended visits with INRIA, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Microsoft Research, and the National University of Singapore. He is the author of books on relational databases, logic programming, and object-oriented databases, as well as papers in database theory, object-oriented technology, scientific databases, and dataspace management. He is a recognized expert on the challenges of large-scale data in the sciences. He received an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1984 and was awarded the 1997 SIGMOD Innovations Award for his contributions in objects and databases. He is also an ACM Fellow and IEEE Senior Member. He holds a dual B.A. in Mathematics and in Computer Science from the University of Oregon (Honors College, 1974) and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University (1978).

James C. McWilliams is Louis B. Slichter Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His citation on being elected to the NAS says “McWilliams is a world leader in the field of nonlinear fluid mechanics with special application to geophysical systems. His work on strong vortices, turbulence, the physics of the oceanic general circulation, and nonlinear instability theory has been instrumental for our understanding of a wide range of observed phenomena.” Prof. McWilliams received a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1971 and, following a research fellowship at Harvard, spend the next two decades as a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with which he remains affiliated. In addition to being a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

 Juan C. Meza, University of California, Merced
Dr. Meza is Dean of the School of Natural Science at the University of California, Merced, having taken that position in September, 2011. Previously, he served as the head and Senior Scientist of the High Performance Computing Research Department at E. O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he worked in computational science and mathematics, computer science and future technologies, scientific data management, visualization, and numerical algorithms and application development. In that position, he was also responsible for developing short- and long-term R&D plans and proposing new technology directions. His current research interests include nonlinear optimization with an emphasis on methods for parallel computing. He has also worked on various scientific and engineering applications including scalable methods for nanoscience , power grid reliability, molecular conformation problems, optimal design of chemical vapor deposition furnaces, and semiconductor device modeling. Prior to joining Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dr. Meza held the position of Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories and served as the manager of the Computational Sciences and Mathematics Research department. He was recently named to Hispanic Business magazine’s Top 100 Influentials in the area of science. In addition, he has been elected a Fellow of the AAAS and was the 2008 recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize and the SACNAS Distinguished Scientist Award. He was also a member of the team that won the 2008 ACM Gordon Bell Award for Algorithm Innovation. Dr. Meza has served on numerous external committees including the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee; the Human Resources Advisory Committee for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute; the boards of trustees for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and SIAM; the Board of Governors for the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications; and the External Advisory Committee for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure.

John W. Morgan, Stony Brook University
Dr. Morgan is Director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at SUNY-Stony Brook. He received his BA and PhD in mathematics from Rice University in 1968 and 1969, respectively. He was an instructor at Princeton University from 1969 to 1972, and an assistant professor at MIT from 1972 to 1974, and then on the faculty at Columbia University from 1974 until July of 2009, when he moved to Stony Brook University to become the first director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. Dr. Morgan has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Stanford University, The Université de Paris, The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, and The Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. He is an editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society and Geometry and Topology. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009.

Vijayan N. Nair, University of Michigan
Dr. Nair is a professor of statistics and of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan. He is an expert in experimental design and system development, particularly in industrial applications. He has done extensive consulting work with the automotive and telecommunications industries, which has required the development, testing, and analysis of large databases for quality control. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, he was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey for 15 years. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a senior member of the American Society for Quality. He served as editor of Technometrics and as joint editor of International Statistical Review. He was a member of the Committee on National Statistics and has served on a number of National Research Council committees. Dr. Nair holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Malaya and a PhD in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Claudia Neuhauser, University of Minnesota
Dr. Neuhauser is Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and an adjunct professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota, where she also directs the Center for Learning Innovation and the program of Graduate Studies in Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology. She received her PhD in mathematics from Cornell University after completing her undergraduate work in Heidelberg, Germany. Before joining the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Dr. Neuhauser served as a professor at the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and the University of California, Davis. Dr. Neuhauser’s work on spatial stochastic processes centers on mechanisms of coexistence in food webs, including disease dynamics. Mathematical models are used to investigate nonequilibrium dynamics after large-scale perturbations in natural and managed habitats with the goal of understanding their evolutionary and ecological consequences. Physiological models of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and bacteria are used to investigate ecosystem consequences of physiological tradeoffs.

J. Tinsley Oden, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Oden is Associate Vice President for Research, founder and director of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, and a professor of Mathematics and of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. He has authored over 500 scientific publications, including authoring or editing 50 books. Dr. Oden is an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a Fellow of six international scientific/technical societies. He is a Fellow, founding member, and first president of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics and the International Association for Computational Mechanics. He is a Fellow and past President of both the American Academy of Mechanics and the Society of Engineering Science, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Among the numerous awards he has received for his work, he has been awarded the A. C. Eringen Medal, the Worcester Reed Warner Medal, the Lohmann Medal, the Theodore von Karman Medal, the John von Neumann medal, the Newton/Gauss Congress Medal, and the Stephan P. Timoshenko Medal. He has been knighted as “Chevalier des Palmes Academiques” by the French government and he holds five honorary doctorates.

Fred S. Roberts, professor in the Department of Mathematics at Rutgers University
Dr. Roberts is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Rutgers University; Director of Department of Homeland Security University Center of Excellence for Command, Control and Interoperability and Advanced Data Analysis; Chair of the Rutgers University Homeland Security Research Initiative and Director Emeritus and Special Advisor of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. He is a member of Rutgers’ Graduate Faculties in mathematics, operations research, computer science, computational molecular biology, computational biology and molecular biophysics, education, and industrial and systems engineering.

Carl P. Simon, Professor of Mathematics, Economics, Complex Systems and Public Policy at The University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1970. He was the founding Director of the UM Center for the Study of Complex Systems (1999-2009) and the Associate Director for Social Science and Policy of the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute. He is currently Director of the U-M Science and Technology Policy Program. His research interests center around the theory and applications of dynamical systems. He has applied dynamic modeling to the spread of AIDS (in particular the role of primary infection), staph infection, malaria and gonorrhea, and to the evolution of ecological and economic systems. He is coauthor of the text Mathematics for Economists. His research team won the 1995 Howard M. Temin Award in Epidemiology for Scientific Excellence in the Fight against HIV/AIDS and the 2005 Kenneth Rothman Epidemiology Prize for paper of the year in Epidemiology. He was named the U-M LS&A Distinguished Senior Lecturer for 2007 and received the U-M Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 2012.

J.B. Silvers, Dean, 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.

Eva Tardos, Cornell University
Dr. Tardos is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, and was department chair 2006-2010. She received her BA and PhD from Eötvös University in Budapest. She had a Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Bonn, a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at Eötvös University, and was a visiting professor at Department of Mathematics at MIT 1987-89 before joining the faculty at Cornell. She has won the Fulkerson Prize, awarded jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society, and the Dantzig prize awarded jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1991-93), an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991-96), the David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering (1990-95), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000). She is a Fellow of ACM, INFORMS, and SIAM, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Tardos’s research focuses on algorithms and games on networks. She is most known for her work on network-flow algorithms, approximation algorithms, and quantifying the efficiency of selfish routing. Dr. Tardos was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2007.

Karen L. Vogtmann is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, specializing in geometric group theory. She has held faculty positions at the University of Michigan, Brandeis University, and Columbia University, and research positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, as well as at vari­ous international institutions. She is a member of the U.S. National Committee on Mathematics and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Mathematical Science Research Institute. She is also a member of the board of trustees of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and is that board’s liaison to the AMS Committee on Science Policy. She served previously as a vice president of the AMS and as a member of the AMS Committee on Education.

Bin Yu is Chancellor’s Professor in the departments of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and she currently chairs the statistics department. She works on statistical methodologies and models involving large data sets from remote sensing, data networks (Internet and sensor networks), neuroscience, finance, and bioinformatics. She has also carried out both theoretical and computational research on different areas of statistical machine learning. Prof. Yu received a B.S. in Mathematics from Peking University in 1984 and M.S. and PhD degrees in statistics, both from the University of California at Berkeley (PhD in 1990). Prior to coming to Berkeley as a faculty member, she taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Yale University, and she was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in 1998-2000. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the IEEE, the AAAS, and the American Statistical Association, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. She currently serves as Action Editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and Associate Editor of Technometrics and Statistica Sinica. She has served on the board of the IEEE Information Theory Society and the council of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.