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Tony Chan, PhD Tony Chan arrived in Washington (Arlington) in early October as the new Assistant Director of NSF and the head of the NSF Directorate for Mathematics and Physical Sciences. With a documented history of advocating interdiscplinary research across the mathematical sciences, especially in the inter-related computer science subdisciplines of Image Processing (IP), Computer Graphics (CG), and Computer Vision (CV), and with his current interests in computational geometry for neurological mapping applications, Dr. Chan's research perspective is expected to promote new directions and strengthen relationships among computational, physical, mathematical, and life sciences. After participating in planning the FY2008 NSF budget as well as dealing with the realities of the FY2007 federal budget, he has new experience and insight with which to help chart a future course for NSF. Dr. Chan will share the experience of his first 100 days in office, describing his transmogrification from academic director to NSF Directorate head. In his talk, Dr. Chan will address his hopes and the direction he has tried to foster at NSF, as well as how that perspective of NSF may have changed now that he has had time to acclimate to the Federal system. As his current research is funded by a combination of NSF, NIH, and ONR, Dr. Chan recognizes that there are opportunities for coordination and cooperation among agencies to promote cross-disciplinary research. At the end of his remarks, he plans to open a continuing conversation on how NSF and NIH could participate in future cross-agency, interdisciplinary initiatives. Biosketch Tony F. Chan is Assistant Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the new head of the NSF Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS) Directorate. From that position, Dr. Chan is guiding and managing research funding totaling approximately $1 billion a year to support astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, materials science and multidisciplinary activities. Dr. Chan has been Dean of Physical Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles for the past five years, with oversight of six and several research institutes comprising more than 200 faculty, 1,700 undergraduates, 700 graduate students, and over over $60 million in research awards annually. He is also co-director of UCLA's NIH-Roadmap Center for Computational Biology. Tony received a B.S. in engineering and an M.S. in aeronautics from Caltech in 1973, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1978. He has over 200 research publications. He served on the faculty of Yale University, before joining UCLA, eventually serving as chairman of the Mathematics Department, Director of the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, and on the SIAM Board of Trustees and Committee on Science Policy, to name but a few of his accolades, accomplishments, and credentials. Dr. Chan's current chief research interests involve interdisciplinary mathematics in such fields as image processing and computer vision, multiscale computational methods, optimization and multilevel methods for electronics design, and computational geometry for brain mapping. |