Dr. Tony CHAN 陈繁昌 博士
Assistant Director for Math & Physical Science
National Science Foundation
美国国家自然科学基金会，数学及物理学副会长
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~chan/

BIO:
Tony Chan's scientific background is in mathematics, computer science and engineering. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees (in engineering) from CalTech and his Ph.D. (in computer science) from Stanford University, worked at CalTech (Applied Math) as a Research Fellow, and taught at Yale (Computer Science) before joining the UCLA faculty in 1986 as Professor of Mathematics. He became Chair of the Department of Mathematics in 1997. Currently, he also holds honorary joint appointments with the BioEngineering Department and the Computer Science Department at UCLA.

He was one of the principal investigators who made the successful proposal to NSF to form the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA, with a vision to promote collaborations between the mathematical sciences with the general scientific and engineering disciplines. He served as IPAM’s Director from 2000-2001. From July 2001 to June 2006, he served as Dean of Physical Sciences at UCLA, overseeing a Division with over 200 faculty FTEs, 700 graduate students, 700 undergraduate majors and $70M annual federal research support. Since October 2006, he has been on temporary leave from UCLA to serve as Assistant Director of the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. The MPS Directorate encompasses five Divisions (Astronomy, Chemistry, Materials Research, Mathematical Sciences and Physics) and is the largest Directorate at NSF with an annual budget of just over $1B. He had served as founding co-Director of the Center for Computational Biology at UCLA, an NIH-funded interdisciplinary center under the NIH Roadmap initiative, until he had to relinquish that role to take the position at NSF.

He is an active member of many scientific societies, including the Society of Industrial & Applied Mathematics (where he is currently a member of the Board of Trustees), the American Mathematical Society and the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers. He has served on the editorial boards of many journals in mathematics and computing, including SIAM Review, SIAM J. Sci. Comp. and the Asian J. of Math and is one of three Editors-in-Chief of Numerisch Mathematik. He co-wrote the proposal to start a new SIAM Journal of Imaging Sciences and serves on its inaugural editorial board. He formerly served on the NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee and is a current member of the US National Committee on Mathematics, and represented the US to the 2006 General Assembly of the International Mathematics Union in Spain.

His current research interests include mathematical image processing and computer vision, VLSI physical design and computational brain mapping. He has published over 200 refereed papers and is one of the most cited mathematicians according to http://isihighlycited.com/. He has mentored over 25 Ph.D. students and 15 postdoctoral fellows.

He has given many invited plenary talks at national and international meetings, including the 1989 SIAM National Meeting, the 2002 Joint Mathematics Meeting, the 2005 Asian Mathematics Conference, and the 2001 International Conference of Chinese Mathematicians. He has won two Best Paper awards (IEEE and ISPD). He has also served on many advisory committees, including the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the Hausdorf Center for Math in Bonn.

Presentation Title: Cyber-enabled Scientific Discovery

Abstract:
Computational simulation has become one of three main ways to explore modern science, complementary to theory and experiment. This has had enormous and fundamental impact in the advent of science and engineering. The US National Science Foundation, being the main federal agency responsible for supporting basic science and engineering, has made major commitments and investments in the broad area of Cyber-enabled scientific discovery. We take a broad-based approach and consider the whole spectrum of activities ranging from modeling complex systems, fast and accurate computational algorithms, cyber-infrastructures to provide both capability and capacity, handling of and extracting knowledge from large data sets, and virtual organizations to facilitate collaboration of scientific communities. In this talk, I’ll review some of the activities and investments that NSF has started in this area.