David Manderscheid
Welcome to my personal webpage. I currently serve as the Division Director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. I am a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and former Senior Vice Chancellor and Provost there. The picture above is of the sun rising over the Tennessee River and the Great Smoky Mountains. I took the picture from the deck of our home using an iPhone.
This photo of me is from 2020 and was taken in the lobby of Hodges Library at UTK.
I have been a professor for over thirty years and an administrator for twenty. I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, where my father was a professor of Agricultural Economics at Michigan State and my mother was MSU Mathematics Librarian, after working as a stay-at-home mom. I received my BS in Math at MSU and then went on to a PhD at Yale.
My first job was at the University of Utah. The math department there was a great fit and so I was able to get my career off to a terrific start. As an avid outdoors person and fitness enthusiast, I enjoyed the skiing and snowshoeing in Utah, not to mention the great cycling and hiking.
My next job was at the University of Iowa. It was a homecoming of sorts as both my parents grew up in Iowa and we visited every summer to see family – indeed, my maternal grandmother lived in Iowa City. Even better, I met my wife there. I rose through the ranks at Iowa to become department chair. My research career thrived with a number of excellent publications and strong federal grant support. I was chosen as a member of the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
After Iowa, I served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As at Iowa, I had a significant impact on student success, diversity, equity and inclusion, and support of faculty. In particular, my work on interdisciplinary research initiatives whet my appetite for a job with a broader scope and so I moved to Ohio State as Executive Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Vice Provost for Arts and Sciences.
At Ohio State, I ran one of the largest and best colleges of arts and sciences in the country. I continued to focus on student success, diversity, equity and inclusion, and support of faculty. I added in renovating and building facilities, fundraising, and even more interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. In particular, I was the lead dean for the Translational Data Analytics Initiative for which we hired over fifty faculty across eight colleges to work with existing faculty on the foundations and applications of data science. My successes made me hunger for the opportunity to have an even greater impact, so I moved to Tennessee to be Senior Vice Chancellor and Provost.
I ran the academic side of the house at UTK. We accomplished a remarkable number of things around student success, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and support for faculty. I co-led a planning group that created the framework for the Oak Ridge Innovation Institute-- a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to add 60 faculty and 400 graduate students in materials, data science, and sustainability. We took on, with great success, the challenges COVID-19 brought to campus.
After deciding to step aside as Provost to return to the faculty, I spent a year integrating into the mathematics department and more fully engaging with the national mathematics community than I was able to do as Provost. This included teaching classes, research, and serving as Chief Diversity Officer for the department. It also included serving on the Committee of Visitors for the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation, as one of the three subcommittee leads, and becoming a mentor for the Mathematics Alliance, a group that is having a major impact nationally on underrepresentation in mathematics and which grew out of work we did at Iowa when I was department chair.
When the search for the Division Director for DMS was announced in the Summer of 2021, I was urged by many to apply. That was an easy sell as my service on the COV for DMS had convinced me of two things -- NSF was a great place to work and my skills would allow me to do a good job. I knew that if I was selected that I could have a substantial and lasting positive impact on the mathematical sciences. I started in February 2022 and could not be more thrilled with the job. We have made DMS a more inclusive and welcoming place, including achieving gender-parity among program officers - a first for DMS and remarkable since less than 30% of PhDs in the Mathematical Sciences go to women. We are also building partnerships within the agency, with other federal agencies, and foundations to further the mathematical sciences and the national interest. Of particular note is our funding of the largest project ever supported by DMS -- the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology. This project is led by Northwestern and the University of Chicago with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation.