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March 29, 2017

Liliana Borcea Named AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) have selected Liliana Borcea to deliver the prestigious Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture at the 2017 SIAM Annual Meeting.

Mathematics at Rice University. Throughout her career she has held visiting positions both in the US, at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and Stanford University, and abroad, most recently at École Normale Supérieure, Paris.

Borcea is the Peter Field Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. She is a leading applied mathematician working on imaging and inverse problems related to partial differential equations. Borcea was selected to deliver the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture for her distinguished scientific contributions to the mathematical and numerical analysis of wave propagation in random media, array imaging in complex environments, and inverse problems in high-contrast electrical impedance tomography, as well as model reduction techniques for parabolic and hyperbolic partial differential equations.

Borcea has an impressive list of publications and has regularly conducted tutorials and short courses on imaging and inverse problems at institutions around the world. Currently two post docs and two graduate students are working under her supervision at the University of Michigan, continuing her record of directing post docs and graduate students while at Rice University.

Borcea received her undergraduate degree in Applied Physics from the University of Bucharest, Romania, followed by an MS and a PhD in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics from Stanford University. Borcea started her academic career as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Before coming to the University of Michigan in 2013, she moved up in the ranks from assistant professor to Noah Harding Professor in the Department of Computational and Applied

In addition to her contributions on scientific research, Borcea is very involved in service to the community of applied and computational mathematics. Currently, she is an elected member of the SIAM Council and serves on the SIAM Coordinating Committee for theJoint Mathematics Meetings. She has served as a member of the IPIA (Inverse Problems International Association) Steering Committee and is now a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the National Academy of Finland, for the Center of Excellence in Inverse Problems Research. Borcea has served on the editorial boards of several leading journals on applied and computational mathematics, including, for instance, Multiscale Modeling and Simulation: A SIAM Interdisciplinary Journal.

The 2017 SIAM Annual Meeting will be held July 10–14 in Pittsburgh, PA. The Kovalevsky Lecture honors Sonia Kovalevsky (1850–1891), the most widely known Russian mathematician of the late 19 th century. In 1874, Kovalevsky received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Göttingen and was appointed lecturer at the University of Stockholm in 1883. She did her most important work in the theory of differential equations. Past Kovalevsky lecturers are Lisa Fauci, Linda J.S Allen, Irene M. Gamba, Margaret Cheney, Barbara Keyfitz, Susanne Brenner, Suzanne Lenhart, Andrea Bertozzi, Dianne O’Leary, Lai-Sang Young, Irene Fonseca, Ingrid Daubechies, Joyce McLaughlin and Linda R. Petzold.

Association for Women in Mathematics 11240 Waples Mill Road, Suite 200 • Fairfax, Virginia 22030 703.934.0163 Tel • 703.359.7562 Fax • [email protected] • www.awm-math.org