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Welcome to my personal webpage. I am a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I previously served as Division Director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Before my time at NSF I served as Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor at UTK. 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 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 got my career off to a great start. As an outdoors person and fitness fanatic, 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, 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, a professor of history, there. My research career thrived with a number of excellent publications and strong federal grant support. I rose through the ranks at Iowa to become department chair, and I was chosen as an Inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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 access, student success, 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 access, student success, 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 want 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 access, student success, 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 which is now thriving and emphasizes materials, data science, and energy. 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 in mathematics, and serving on the department executive committee. It also included serving on the Committee of Visitors for the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the NSF as one of the three subcommitte co-leads.
When a search for the DMS Division Director was announced in 2021 I applied. I was selected and then served as Division Director from 2022 to 2026. I led the division to impacts even higher than the goals I had set. We built partnerships within the agency, with other federal agencies, and private foundations to further the Mathematical Sciences and the national interest in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, and Biotechnology and using these applications to find new results in the Mathematical Sciences. Of particular note is our funding of two new institutes. The first is the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology. This project is led by Northwestern University and the University of Chicago with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation, the largest project ever for DMS. The second is the Institute for Computer Aided Reasoning in Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, the newest Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and a foray into one of the hottest topics in Math. This was in addition to enhancing core programs.
I am now back to being a faculty member at UTK. Stay tuned to see what the future will bring.
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