Association for Women in Mathematics

Maeve Lewis McCarthy

AWM Executive Director Maeve Lewis McCarthy is a native of Ireland. A professor of mathematics at Murray State University, her research interests include the application of eigenvalues to population dynamics and mechanical design. Her work in differential equations and inverse problems focuses on the identification of parameters in biological and physical applications. In 2006, she received a Presidential Research Fellowship from Murray State University and an Academic Achievement Award from the Commonwealth of Kentucky for her research. McCarthy credits being the recipient of an AWM Mentoring Travel Grant in 2000 with "kick-starting her research after graduate school." Her involvement with AWM began as a graduate student when she participated in an AWM workshop at the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics annual meeting. In accepting the Executive Directorship of AWM in 2008, McCarthy wrote, "I hope I can be as good for AWM as AWM has been for me."

Georgia Benkart

AWM President Georgia Benkart has spent her entire career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has been E. B. Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics. She has held visiting positions at the University of Virginia, the Aspen Center for Physics, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute where she has been Simons Research Professor of Mathematics. Her research focuses on algebra, more specifically on Lie theory, combinatorics, quantum groups, and representation theory, and she has supervised 21 Ph.D. students who have worked on various aspects of these topics. In 1987, she received the University of Wisconsin's Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2000, she was named the Polya Lecturer of the Mathematics Association of America. At the January 2009 Joint Mathematics Meetings, AWM President Cathy Kessel handed Georgia Benkart the silver bowl symbolizing the transfer of power. Said Benkart, "I am very grateful to be handed this gift of the presidency and thank Cathy Kessel for her two years of dedicated leadership as President of AWM (and for her shining example of how to polish the bowl)."

Fan Chung Graham

Fan Chung Graham was the 2009 AWM Emmy Noether Lecturer at the Joint Mathematics Meetings. Born in Taiwan, Chung began her distinguished career at Bell Laboratories. Since 1998, she has been Professor of Mathematics and of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where she is also the Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics. In 1990, she received the Allendoerfer Award from the Mathematics Association of America, and in 1998, she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts. An expert on algorithmic design, combinatorics, and graph theory, Chung has made fundamental contributions to research on large information networks such as the wwwgraph and holds several patents. Fan Chung is one of the "Four Women from Taiwan" featured on the Mathematics Association of America's new Women in Mathematics poster. She, Sun Yung Alice Chang, Wen-Ching Winnie Li, and Jang-Mei Wu were all undergraduate classmates at National Taiwan University, and former AWM president Chuu-Lian Terng was in the next class. What a remarkable group of mathematicians!

Dianne O'Leary

Dianne O'Leary delivered the Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture at the 2008 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Annual Meeting. O'Leary is a professor in the computer science department and at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland. A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, she has served as a consultant at the National Institute of Standards and Technology since 1978. She was selected as the Kovalevsky Lecturer by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Association for Women in Mathematics in recognition of her significant research in computational linear algebra and optimization, subjects at the interface between computer science and mathematics. Her work includes numerous articles in diverse areas, such as conjugate gradient methods and preconditioners, regularization, image processing, truncated Newton methods, block conjugate gradient and quasi-Newton methods, linear and quadratic programming, and hidden Markov models. Applications of her core research work include information retrieval, computational biology, and quantum computing. In addition to this research, O'Leary has been deeply engaged in education and mentoring activities throughout her career.

Cathy Kessel

Cathy Kessel, AWM Past President, was educated as a mathematician, specializing in model theory, a subfield of mathematical logic. During the 1990s, she made the shift from being a mathematician to being a researcher in mathematics education, auditing courses, and working on research projects at the School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley. She now works as a consultant in mathematics education. Her experience includes work for the College Board, being an additional writer for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' Principles and Standards of School Mathematics, an editor for the Conference Board on the Mathematical Sciences report The Mathematical Education of Teachers, and an editor for Liping Ma's Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. Her publications include detailed studies of a student's understanding of linear functions and of a problem solving course; and articles on cognition and gender.