2023 SIAM Southeastern Atlantic Section Annual Meeting Attracts Young Researchers

The 45th Annual Meeting of the SIAM Southeastern Atlantic Section (SIAM-SEAS) took place at Virginia Tech (VT) from March 25 to 26, 2023, with generous support from SIAM and VT’s Department of Mathematics and College of Science. It was the first fully in-person SIAM-SEAS meeting since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the previous iteration (at Auburn University in 2021) was hybrid. SIAM provided travel support for the three plenary speakers, as well as 25 travel awards for student attendees.

The 2023 SIAM-SEAS Annual Meeting attracted more than 200 participants, 53 of whom were students. The organizing committee made a special effort to include as many young scientists as possible, and the large number of students and postdoctoral researchers who presented their work reflects the committee’s success. All of the student attendees delivered oral presentations during the meeting’s 47 minisymposium sessions. A group of 23 minisymposium organizers and 14 faculty members evaluated these presentations and designated the following student award recipients:

• First place: Matt Dallas (University of Florida), Shane McQuarrie (University of Texas at Austin), and Hanwen Yao (Duke University) 
• Second place: Mo Zhou (Duke University) 
• Third place: McKenzie Black (University of South Carolina), Benjamin Jany (University of Kentucky), Conlain Kelly (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Sarah Strikwerda (North Carolina State University)
• Honorable mention: Linus Balicki (VT), Morgan Jackson (Virginia Commonwealth University), Anthony Krueger (VT), Julia Shapiro (VT), William Snyder (VT), Yixuan Tan (Duke University), and Zezhong Zhang (Florida State University).

Beyond the minisymposium presentations, the three plenary lectures were all very well attended. Sara Pollock (University of Florida) delivered the first plenary talk, which focused on recent innovations in the theory and application of the Anderson acceleration: a powerful, low-cost method that accelerates the convergence of fixed-point iterations. Omer San (Oklahoma State University) gave the second plenary lecture and surveyed exciting state-of-the-art developments in scientific machine learning and classical numerical discretizations, merging fundamentally different ideas to create hybrid computational strategies for the future of science and engineering. In the final plenary address, Lili Ju (University of South Carolina) introduced novel discretization schemes for conservative Allen-Cahn equations that unconditionally preserve the maximum bound principle in the discrete sense.

SIAM-SEAS leadership—president Traian Iliescu (VT), vice president Leo Rebholz (Clemson University), and secretary/treasurer Zhu Wang (University of South Carolina)—worked with SIAM staff to plan the initial components of the 2023 SIAM-SEAS Annual Meeting. The SIAM-SEAS local organizing committee, which made outstanding efforts to ensure the event’s success, was chaired by Honghu Liu (VT) and comprised the following members of VT’s Department of Mathematics: Nicole Abaid, Paul Cazeaux, Giuseppe Cotardo, Jason LeGrow, Agnieszka Miedlar, Petar Mlinarić, Fazle Rabby, Joseph Wells, Fangchi Yan, and Pengtao Yue. The SIAM Student Chapter at VT (which includes Mike Ackermann, Sam Bender, Jenifer De Jager, Rodrigo Figueroa, Dan Folescu, Wendi Gao, Yichen Guo, Anayse Miller, Ian Moore, Dylan Park, Matt Park, Nicolas Swanson, Tatiane Swap, Cankat Tilki, and Teona Zurabashvili)—along with William Snyder (a student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics)—worked tirelessly to guarantee the conference’s seamless execution. The meeting would not have been possible without the help of these volunteers, and we are very grateful for their contributions.