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Division Director Update
December 2021
Happy Holidays and welcome to the DMS December 2021 newsletter. I’d like to start by wishing everybody in the math community a wonderful holiday and I hope you can enjoy some time off.
As I’m sure I don’t have to tell anyone, this has been both a challenging and exciting year. All of us have struggled with the effects and consequences of the pandemic, and I wanted to acknowledge everyone for all your efforts in this extraordinary year.
To recap some of the highlights from this year:
In the September issue I mentioned that we had been fortunate to attract some truly outstanding mathematicians to join our DMS programs, including Yulia Gel, Marian Gidea, Stacey Levine, Adriana Salerno, and Jeremy Tyson. I however failed to acknowledge the previous year’s cohort, who also started in the middle of the pandemic and for whom we are incredibly grateful to have come on board during such a challenging time. They are: Tiziana Giorgi from New Mexico State and Eun Heui Kim from Cal State Long Beach, both of whom joined Applied Math, Constanze Liaw from the University of Delaware who joined Analysis, Edsel Pena from the University of South Carolina who joined Statistics, and Sandy Spiroff from the University of Mississippi who joined Algebra and Number Theory. All of them helped us tremendously as we experimented with moving to the new virtual format for panels and all of them have done an admirable job. I’m also happy to announce that we added a new rotator this month, Stephen Wirkus from Arizona State University, who joined the Applied Math program on December 6.
You may have heard that we announced a new Deputy Division Director, Junping Wang, who was serving as a Program Director in the Math Biology program. He brings with him a deep knowledge of DMS, and we are all pleased with his selection. I also want to thank Henry Warchall and Tracy Kimbrel who served as Acting Deputy Division Directors for the first half of the year as we searched for the new Deputy.
Other staff news included the retirement of Victor Roytburd, whose expertise, collegiality, and deep knowledge of mathematics will be sorely missed.
On the program side, you may remember that in a direct response to the pandemic DMS increased its focus on support for early-career investigators including MSPRF, REU sites, and Research Training Group (RTG) grants. As a result, we added an additional 20 MSPRF awards for a total of 61 this year. In addition, we doubled the number of RTG grants from the previous year enabling us to support an additional 738 early career researchers over the next 5 years.
The DMS Virtual Office Hours continue to be well attended and are providing us with a much needed means to stay in touch with the math community. If you haven’t had the chance to attend one, please register for one of these sessions.
Many of you have asked about in-person panels. For the time being, DMS continues to hold virtual panels and at least for the foreseeable future we will continue to do so. I want to express my deep thanks to the entire DMS Administrative team here, because it is due to their incredible support this past year that we’ve been able to handle the transition to virtual panels so seamlessly, as well as their support to make the DMS Virtual Office Hours so successful.
Overall, I am deeply grateful to be able to work with such a talented and dedicated group of individuals in service of the math community. As we look ahead, I wish all of you a Happy Holiday and all the best for the coming New Year.
Juan C. Meza
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