Pacific Northwest Numerical Analysis Seminar 2012

Boise State University will host the 25th Annual Pacific Northwest Numerical Analysis Seminar October 26-27, 2012. The goal of the meeting is to bring together interdisciplinary researchers from universities, government research labs, and industry from the Pacific Northwest to share expertise in both pure and applied aspects of numerical analysis and computational mathematics. The traditional format of a day-long Saturday session for invited talks will be modified to include a Friday evening poster session for students and postdoctoral fellows to present their work. This will create a vertically integrated meeting bringing together individuals from undergraduates to distinguished researchers. The inclusion of participants from national labs and industry will foster new potential research and employment opportunities for a broadened presence of students and postdocs.

Boise State University, which for many years served as an undergraduate teaching institution, has recently been making key investments in faculty, staff, and infrastructure to transition into a research-oriented institution. The Pacific Northwest Numerical Analysis Seminar will be the first conference ever held at Boise State University in this area of mathematics, and will help strengthen the recently developed foundation in computational mathematics that is needed to educate a technological workforce in this underrepresented region of the US. There will be speakers whose work: (1) interfaces with the biological and mathematical sciences; (2) involves energy sustainability; (3) focuses on the challenges of ?big-data?; and (4) concerns the development of cyberinfrastructure. Speakers will include senior and junior faculty, women researchers/educators, and graduate students. In addition to standard communication channels, the seminar will be promoted through the Boise State University student chapters of the Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Pacific Northwest Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) consortium to broaden participation from underrepresented groups.