Prof. Dr. Irene Fonseca An internationally respected educator and researcher in applied mathematics; Irene Fonseca is the director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Nonlinear Analysis (CNA).
In recognition for her contributions to the advancement of research in her area of expertise, Irene Fonseca was bestowed a knighthood in the Military Order of St. James (Grande Oficial da Ordem Militar de Santiago da Espada) by the then-President of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, in 1997. For her teaching and research contributions to Carnegie Mellon University, Irene Fonseca was honored with the Mellon College of Science endowed chair in 2003 and named a University Professor in 2014. In 2012 she was elected President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), one of the largest organizations dedicated to mathematics and computational science in the world. In 2018 Irene Fonseca was installed as the first Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics.

Dr. Sven Leyffer joined the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne in 2002, where he is now a senior computational mathematician. Sven is a SIAM Fellow, and a senior fellow of the University of Chicago/Argonne Computation Institute.
He is the current SIAM President and serves on the editorial boards of Computational Optimization and Applications, and Mathematics of Computation.
In 2006, Leyffer (along with two colleagues) received the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, which is awarded only once every 3 years. In 2016, he received the Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society.
Leyffer obtained his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Dundee, Scotland, and held postdoctoral research positions at Dundee, Argonne, and Northwestern University.