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SIAM Celebrates Women's History Month 2026

March is Women's History Month! To celebrate, SIAM is featuring SIAM members Andrea Bertozzi, Gabriele Eichfelder, and Shelby Lockhart. This month, we hope you will take a moment to read through these spotlights of women in our community and a curated list of resources and networks tailored for women in STEM.

Andrea Bertozzi

Dr. Andrea Bertozzi is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Betsy Wood Knapp Chair for Innovation and Creativity at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and an applied mathematician with expertise in nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid dynamics. She also works in the areas of geometric methods for image processing, social science modeling, and swarming/cooperative dynamics.

Dr. Bertozzi earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University (1991), with a focus on partial differential equations from fluid dynamics. She was an L. E. Dickson Instructor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago (1991-1995), where she started working in computing and collaborating with physics and math students and faculty. This was an eye-opening experience that she credits to her mentors for providing a nurturing, cooperative environment in which to work and learn. She remained at the University of Chicago for four years before moving to the Argonne National Laboratory as the Maria Geoppert-Mayer Distinguished Scholar (1995-1996) and later joined the faculty at Duke University (1995-2004).

While at Duke, Dr. Bertozzi explored the application of mathematics developed in fluid dynamics to swarming models and image processing. Her first paper on image processing is now her most highly cited paper and led to her joining UCLA as a mathematics professor (2003). At UCLA, she served as Director of Applied Mathematics, overseeing the graduate and undergraduate research training programs (2005-2025). She was also appointed the Betsy Wood Knapp Chair for Innovation and Creativity (2012) and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering (2018).

Over the next decade, Dr. Bertozzi developed research programs in partial differential equations (PDEs) applied to image processing and swarming models. At that point, her research focus shifted to the intersections of nonlinear PDE and high dimensional data analysis and machine learning. She has since grown a research program in machine learning and AI that is largely focused on graph-based models with a diverse set of applications, ranging from security applications to remote sensing for planetary issues such as surface water detection.

Dr. Bertozzi also has a very diverse research program at UCLA, which includes a wet lab with particle-laden flow experiments, a cooperative robotics platform, and a computational lab for collaborations with faculty in the California NanoSystems Institute. Their work is currently focused on DNA aptamer design and digital twins for high-powered lasers, with additional ongoing work on quantum sensing algorithms.

Dr. Bertozzi is a longstanding member of SIAM and a 2010 SIAM Fellow, with 35 years of dedication to the community. Her first experience with SIAM was as an author, in which she published a paper in SIAM Journal Mathematical Analysis in 1988 based on her undergraduate thesis at Princeton. Both the research problem and the journal were suggested by her advisor, Andrew Majda. She found SIAM’s review process very fair, and she was welcomed to publish despite not having a Ph.D. when the paper was published. Another early paper of hers, from an internship at Bell Labs with Jim McKenna on queuing theory, was published in SIAM Review. Dr. Bertozzi found herself attending many SIAM conferences while she was still a postdoc and early career faculty member, which included SIAM Annual Meetings and specialty conferences like the SIAM Conference on Mathematical Aspects of Materials Science. Having the opportunity to meet senior applied mathematicians and discuss research at SIAM conferences was paramount for her early career.

Over time, Dr. Bertozzi’s involvement in SIAM broadened. She served on the SIAM Council (2006-2008) and the editorial boards for SIAM Review, SIAM Journal Mathematical Analysis, SIAM Journal Imaging Sciences, and Multiscale Modeling and Simulation; she has published in many SIAM journals, including SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science, SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems, SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, and more. She was named the 2009 AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer and received the 2019 Ralph E. Kleinman Prize and a 2014 Outstanding Paper Prize. Those recognitions were especially helpful in attracting students to Dr. Bertozzi’s group and improving the recognition of the mathematics department at UCLA. Her SIAM membership has been central to her work and highly influential in her professional career.

Moreover, Dr. Bertozzi’s career has received numerous honors in recognition of her impactful work and leadership, including a Sloan Research Fellowship (1995) and earning the 1996 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010) and became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2013) and the American Physical Society (2016). She served as Chair of the Science Board of the National Science Foundation Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics at Brown University (2010-2014), as a member of the Science Advisory Committee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley (2012-2016), and on the Banff International Research Station Board.

Dr. Bertozzi was also recognized as a Thomson-Reuters/Clarivate Analytics “highly cited” researcher in mathematics (2015 and 2016), an honor that has only been bestowed upon roughly 100 professionals within her field worldwide. She was awarded the 2017 Simons Math + X Investigator Award, joint with UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute, and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2018). In 2023, she was appointed to UCLA's faculty mentoring honor society for her mentoring of early to mid-career faculty.

Additionally, Dr. Bertozzi has served on the editorial boards of several journals such as Interfaces and Free Boundaries, Applied Mathematics Research eXpress, Applied Mathematics Letters, Mathematical Models and Methods in the Applied Sciences, Communications in Mathematical Sciences, Nonlinearity, and Advances in Differential Equations, Journal of Nonlinear Science, Journal of Statistical Physics, Nonlinear Analysis: Real World Applications, and the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. Learn more about Dr. Bertozzi.

Addressing early-career professionals pursuing a similar career path, Dr. Bertozzi shared the following insights: “We are going through some tough times for scientists due to financial struggles at many different levels and lack of full political support for researchers. This has happened before and it will likely happen again. It is important to be cognizant of changing environments for researchers while keeping the bigger picture in mind.

I have seen many of my Ph.D. students take jobs in the tech industry over the past ten years, and I’ve shared my experience being an intern at Bell Labs with each of them. It’s important to have an understanding of what job security means in different professions and compare that to excitement for the work and short-term compensation.

The best advice I can give to young professionals going into research is to find an area that you really love and can engage with for long periods of time, with room to develop the field. When you finish your Ph.D., you will be the world expert on a particular research area. Do not be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and learn new things; it’s the most exciting aspect of research. At the same time, do your due diligence when researching a new area and take the time to carefully read the literature; do not assume that a problem has not already been solved just because you have not read about it.

Finally, I highly recommend talking to new people at research meetings. You never know where a complementary idea to something you have been thinking about can come from.”

Gabriele Eichfelder

Dr. Gabriele Eichfelder is a full professor of mathematical methods of operations research at the Institute of Mathematics, Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. She earned her doctoral degree in 2006 and completed her habilitation in 2012, in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. She works in the field of mathematical optimization with a special interest in nonlinear and global optimization with vector-valued and set-valued objective functions. Her main research interests focus on multi-objective optimization, which helps clarify the dependencies between competing objectives rather than reducing them to a single aggregated function. Despite this being a specific class of problems, Dr. Eichfelder’s research topics are quite diverse, ranging from theoretical examinations and the development of new numerical solvers to concrete applications, including continuous, mixed-integer, and discrete nonlinear problems.

Dr. Eichfelder has authored two Springer research monographs, has published extensively in top international journals, and has received several publication awards. She has served on program committees for many conferences, including the 2021 Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO) Conference in Athens and recent meetings of the EURO Working Group on Continuous Optimization (EUROPT). She also serves on several editorial boards and is currently an Area Editor of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. In 2024, she was also elected as a EUROPT Fellow.

As a SIAM member for 18 years, Dr. Eichfelder has been a dedicated community member in the optimization area. One of her first large, international conferences as a postdoctoral student was the 2008 SIAM Conference on Optimization in Boston, Massachusetts, at which she co-organized a minisymposium. Since then, she has remained an active attendee of the SIAM Conference on Optimization, sharing her research results, exploring publication opportunities, and building long-lasting connections.

She’s also active within the SIAM community, having previously been an organizing committee member for the 2020 and 2021 SIAM Conference on Optimization, program director of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization (2023–2025), and a member of the Ivo & Renata Babuška Prize Selection Committee (2024–2025). She currently serves as a co-organizer of the 2026 SIAM Conference on Optimization in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

Addressing early-career professionals pursuing a similar career path, Dr. Eichfelder offered the following advice: “It is very important that you like what you do. Also, speaking to others and being open to their advice, from scientific input to career development, is often very helpful. In my experience, senior researchers are interested in giving younger researchers career opportunities and support; it often comes down to making sure those opportunities are taken advantage of.”

Shelby Lockhart

Dr. Shelby Lockhart is a senior member of the technical staff at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) where she is an application optimization engineer. She also serves as the lead communication library expert, supporting modeling, benchmarking, optimization, debugging, and training for large-scale scientific applications. Dr. Lockhart received her Ph.D. in scientific computing/high-performance computing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also first joined SIAM through the student chapter. As a SIAM member for nine years, she has attended numerous SIAM conferences and currently serves on the Career Opportunities Committee.

Watch the video below as Dr. Lockhart discusses her research, her involvement in SIAM, and offers advice to early career professionals.

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