Invited Plenary Speakers
Bubacarr Bah
Medical Research Council Unit, The Gambia
Bubacarr Bah is an Associate Professor and Head of Data Science in the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia (MRCG) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He is also the Head of the Data Science Research Group at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in South Africa, where he holds the German Research Chair in Mathematics of Data Science, which is a Senior Researcher position with an adjunct Senior Lecturer position at the Division of Applied Mathematics, Stellenbosch University. Prior to this he held postdoctoral fellowship positions at University of Texas in Austin, U.S.A. and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He had his PhD in applied and computational mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, his MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford, UK and a BSc in Mathematics and Physics at the University of The Gambia.
Tony Baylis
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, U.S.
Tony Baylis is a senior leader, partner, and international advocate for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in scientific and technical environments. His career of more than 30 years has allowed him to foster excellence in several disciplines, including human resources and project, program, technical, and organizational management. In 2005, he joined the computation directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as a workforce and student program manager and was promoted to the role of the Laboratory’s DEI Director in 2013. Tony currently collaborates with LLNL’s senior leadership on DEI strategies and leads the execution of building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive lab culture and workforce. He continues to represent LLNL on the subjects of DEI, science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) outreach, and K-12 student programs. Tony is also a Senior Advisor to the Department of Energy and serves on several nonprofit and academic boards. Previously, he held technical and management roles in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
Victorita Dolean Maini
University of Strathclyde, U.K
Victorita Dolean is a part-time Professor at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA). She did her PhD thesis at INRIA in CFD using domain decomposition and parallel computing and subsequently became a research assistant at CMAP of Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. She got her first lecturer position at Evry University in Paris area, before moving to the University of Nice (now University Côte d’Azur). She also spent one year and a half as a visiting professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She works on the design of fast algorithms for the simulation of complex systems of PDEs with a focus in the latest years on wave propagation problems. Together with her collaborators, she was the recipient of Bull-Joseph Fourier Prize, delivered by Atos-Bull, for her innovative work on real time simulation of strokes using HPC (SIAM News, 2016). She co-authored a reference work on Domain decomposition methods (published by SIAM in 2015).
Weinan E
Peking University, China
Weinan E is a professor at the Center for Machine Learning Research (CMLR) and the School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University. His main research interest is numerical algorithms, machine learning and multi-scale modeling, with applications to chemistry, material sciences and fluid mechanics. He has been a plenary speaker at ICM 2022 and a keynote speaker at ICML 2022. He has also been an invited speaker at APS, ACS, AIChe annual meetings, the World Congress of Computational Mechanics, and the American Conference of Theoretical Chemistry. Weinan E was awarded the ICIAM Collatz Prize in 2003 and the ACM Gordon-Bell Prize in 2020. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a fellow of SIAM, AMS and IOP.
Claudia Sagastizabal
IMECC Unicamp, Brazil
Claudia Sagastizábal is an applied mathematician specialized in optimization, both its theory and its numerical aspects. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of nonsmooth optimization, stochastic programming, and variational analysis, with an emphasis on applications in the energy sector. She is known for her contributions in convex optimization and energy management, and for her co-authorship of the book Numerical Optimization: Theoretical and Practical Aspects. Claudia obtained her PhD and habilitation degrees at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Claudia has participated in industrial collaborations since the time of her PhD studies in the 1990s. After graduating, Claudia became a permanent researcher at INRIA, the French Institute for Automatic Control and Computer Science. In Brazil, she had a research position at Eletrobras’ Electric Energy Research Center. She is currently adjunct researcher at IMECC-Unicamp, the Institute for Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Sciences of the University of Campinas, in Sao Paulo state. Claudia has been invited speaker in the International Conference on Stochastic Programming (ICSP 2019), the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2018), Siam Conference on Mathematics of Planet Earth (2018), the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 2015), the International Symposium of Mathematical Programming (ISMP 2012), and the Siam Conference on Optimization (OPT11). In parallel with her academic activities, Claudia holds or has held consulting R&D appointments for companies such as EdF, Gaz de France-Suez, Engie, and Renault in France; Robert Bosch in Germany; and Petrobras, Bovespa and Eletrobras in Brazil. Since 2015 she has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Set-Valued and Variational Analysis. Since 2021 she also serves as Area Editor of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, as a member of the Editorial Board of EURO Journal on Computational Optimization, and as Associate Editor of Siam Journal of Optimization.
Jacquelien Scherpen
University of Groningen, Netherlands
Jacquelien M. A. Scherpen received her MSc (1990) Ph.D. (1994) degrees in applied mathematics from the University of Twente, The Netherlands. She was faculty at Delft University of Technology until 2007. Since 2006, she is professor at the Jan C. Willems Center, ENTEG, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen (UG). From 2013-2019, she was scientific director of ENTEG. She is currently UG director of the Engineering, and Captain of Science of the Dutch High Tech Systems and Materials Top Sector. Her research interests include model reduction methods for control of networks and nonlinear systems, modeling and control of physical systems with applications to electrical circuits, mechanical systems, and energy grid/network applications including distributed optimal control. Dr. Scherpen has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control (IJRNC) and the IMA Journal of Mathematical Control and Information, and is in the editorial board of IJRNC. She is fellow of IEEE, appointed Knight in the Order of The Netherlands Lion in 2019, and received the best paper prize for the triennium 2017-2020 of Automatica in 2020. She was nominated and elected member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors, was vice chair of the IFAC publication committee, and was president of the European Control Association (EUCA) 2020-2021. She is currently member of the IFAC council, Past-President of EUCA, EUCA-liaison for the IEEE CSS, and elected chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory.
Uros Sikimic
3Lateral, Serbia
Uros Sikimic is leading the Solutions Team at 3Lateral (an Epic Games company). 3Lateral team is developing technologies to empower creation of realistic and interactive digital humans (now recognized as MetaHumans). Within 3Lateral, Uros was engaged to streamline the production and to establish technology backend for multiple blockbuster video games like Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel's Spider-Man, Activision’s Call of Duty, Battlefield 1, Star Wars Battlefront II, Batman: Arkham VR and many more. His expertise lies between technology and business, while he has a proven track record of helping companies grow by maximising the potential embedded in their technologies. Uros Sikimic holds a Bachelor and Master degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Novi Sad (Serbia), and a PhD in Innovation and Technology Management from Politecnico di Milano (Italy). Uros was engaged as a visiting doctoral researcher at Stockholm School of Economics (Sweden) and New York University (USA), where he applied big data research to understand how companies extract maximum value from technologies through productization, patenting and licensing activities. Uros completed his post-doctoral studies at Singapore Management University (Singapore).
Luca Heltai
Sissa (International School for Advanced Studies), Italy
Luca Heltai is an Associate Professor in Numerical Analysis at the International School for Advanced studies, in the Applied Mathematics Laboratory "mathLab" since 2012. He has been a research associate at Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, State College (USA) in the group of Prof. Francesco Costanzo in 2006 and 2007, and he obtained his PhD in Mathematics and Scientific Computing at the University of Pavia, under the supervision of Prof. Daniele Boffi, in 2006. He was a Fulbright scholar at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York (USA), a visiting faculty at the Ecole Polytechnique de Paris, at the Universitat Polytechnica de Catalunia, at the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, and at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. He has been the director and co-founder of the joint SISSA-ICTP Master's program in High Performance Computing (www.mhpc.it) from 2014 to 2022, and he contributed to the design and establishment of the Master Degree in Data Science and Scientific Computing offered jointly by SISSA, ICTP, University of Trieste, and University of Udine (www.dssc.units.it). He is an expert in the development of numerical methods and algorithms for the solution of biological, physiological, and industrial problems modeled by partial differential equations, and he is one of the main developer of the open source library deal.II (www.dealii.org) for the high performance computing solution of partial differential equations.