Recapping the 44th SIAM Southeastern Atlantic Section (SEAS) Conference

The 44th SIAM Southeastern Atlantic Section (SEAS) Conference took place in September 2021 at Auburn University with a hybrid modality. The two-day conference, which was initially scheduled for March 2020, attracted more than 200 participants from the U.S. and five other countries. Roughly 70 people attended the meeting in person, and the remainder joined virtually on Zoom.

The conference program included four plenary talks, 43 parallel minisymposium sessions, four groups of contributed presentations, and a poster session/reception. Oscar Bruno (California Institute of Technology), Jianfeng Lu (Duke University), James Nagy (Emory University), and Juan M. Restrepo (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) served as the plenary speakers. The minisymposia addressed a wide variety of topics that ranged from emerging developments in machine learning and data science to recent advances in theories and numerical methods for partial differential equations and their applications. All of the talks were livestreamed over Zoom with a physical audience in the conference rooms on campus.

Many in-person participants expressed their appreciation to SIAM for the opportunity to interact with academic colleagues and collaborators face to face after nearly two years of virtual conferences. The hybrid nature of the SIAM-SEAS Conference was made possible by the cutting-edge, high-tech classroom facilities at Auburn University. The conference organizers would also like to thank SIAM as well as the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the College of Sciences and Mathematics at Auburn University for their ardent support in bringing this long-delayed event to fruition. They would be happy to share their experiences surrounding the hybrid conference modality with anyone in the SIAM community who is interested in organizing future meetings with similar setups.