Biography
I am the founding Director of Clarkson’s newest Institute – for STEM Education. STEM Ed was the natural outgrowth of Clarkson’s long standing commitment to K-12 outreach in STEM Education, scholarly approach to academic retention studies and the Master of Arts in Teaching which we acquired with Capital Region Campus.
STEM Ed will help establish Clarkson University as a national leader in all aspects of STEM (and broader) Education. Expertise in curriculum development and assessment is combined with STEM discipline strengths to create a near-unique combination that can have real impact in teacher preparation (for K-12 and college-level) and on the recruitment, retention and education of students from a diverse range of backgrounds.
I came to Clarkson in 2002 as the Head of Mathematics and Computer Science, and became Dean of Arts & Sciences in 2008. I moved from that position to lead the new Institute in 2017. As part of my duties in STEM Ed, I am the project director for the development of the Clarkson University Hudson River Estuarium at Pier 26 in lower Manhattan.
External to Clarkson, I have played a leading role in several national STEM Education initiatives. I served for 6 years as Vice president for Education for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). In SIAM, I was also the founding Editor in Chief for SIURO, SIAM Undergraduate Research Online, the leading archival publication for undergraduate research in applied mathematics. I also started the Modeling across the Curriculum initiative which has been influential on many other undergraduate mathematics curricular movements. I was also the proposer and founding Chair of SIAM’s Special Interest Activity Group (SIAG) on Applied Mathematics Education and co-chaired their inaugural conference in the fall of 2016.
I am a Fellow of SIAM, one of about 500 worldwide.
Before coming to Clarkson, I received my B.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield in the UK before spending a combined 28 years on the faculties of the University of Lancaster (UK) and the US Naval Academy.
Areas of Expertise
Research Interests
I arrived as the new Chair of MCS in July 2002. My primary research interests are in computational applied mathematics and, in particular, computer arithmetic. The main focus of my work in computer arithmetic has been on the level-index system which is an alternative to the usual floating-point arithmetic system for numerical computations. Other areas in which I have worked include functional analysis, optimization, numerical analysis, parallel processing, computer vision and computer algebra.