Dear BIO-SIGMAA members,

Although our officer election was originally closed on Nov. 14, it turns out that we did not make the required quorum to make the election official. If you have already voted, thank you! If not, please do so now, by going to the following page:

http://www.maa.org/voting/biosigmaa

You will need your MAA ID number, which can be found on the mailing label of your FOCUS magazine. The election will close again on Dec. 12, and it is important that we make quorum by then.

Nominees for chair-elect are Tim Comar, Holly Gaff and Jennifer Galovich. Tim Walton is the nominee for Secretary and René Salinas is the nominee for Program Director. Biographical information is available at the election page and can also be found below.

Your vote for all three offices is required so we can continue to operate under our current charter.

Thanks, and best wishes for smooth endings to semesters!

Laurie Heyer

Chair, BIO-SIGMAA

Elections for the BIO SIGMAA officers is underway. Members of the BIO SIGMAA are asked to cast their vote by November 14th. The MAA has an online tool set up for doing so here:

http://www.maa.org/voting/biosigmaa.

To vote, members will need their MAA ID number, which can be found on the mailing label of your FOCUS subscription.

We are electing people to fill three positions: Chair Elect, Secretary, and Program Director. Descriptions of these positions can be found in the BIO SIGMAA Charter.

What follows are each candidate's statements for what qualifies them to be fill the official position for which they have been nominates.

Chair Elect

Tim Comar: Dr. Timothy D. Comar completed his undergraduate work in mathematics at Brown University in 1991 and his Ph.D in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1996. He is a 1997 Project NExT Fellow. He is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics at Benedictine University. His scholarly interests include mathematical biology, undergraduate mathematical biology education, and knot theory. He is committed to increasing opportunities for undergraduates to participate in mathematical biology research and mentors undergraduate students in research projects in mathematical biology and knot theory. His current projects include the creation of a new biocalculus textbook, which is supported by a NSF CCLI grant. Dr. Comar is also committed to expanding biomathematics education in the community college environment. His CCLI grant features a partnership with Benedictine University and the community college, College of DuPage, which involves the implementation of biocalculus courses at College of DuPage. He has also presented his work on biocalculus at an annual AMATYC meeting. He ran a PREP workshop on biocalculus pedagogy in the summer of 2008. He is activities in the BIO SIGMAA include the organization of several contributed paper sessions on undergraduate mathematical biology education. He also serves on the MAA CUPM Subcommittee on Mathematics Across the Disciplines, on the Education Committee of the Society of Mathematical Biology, and the editorial board of ESTEEM. He also serves on the board of the Illinois Section of the MAA as the Section’s Project NExT Coordinator.

Holly Gaff: Dr. Holly Gaff is an Assistant Professor in the School of Community and
Environmental Health in the College of Health Sciences at Old Dominion University and is affiliated with the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center. Dr. Gaff earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics with an emphasis in Mathematical Ecology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1999, and her B.S. in Mathematics/Environmental Sciences from Taylor University in 1993. Dr. Gaff was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of
California at San Francisco and at Berkeley as well as at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She also worked as a management consultant in telecommunication modeling and as a research scientist for a government contracting firm. Prior to coming to Old Dominion University, Dr. Gaff was on the faculty at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine.

Dr. Gaff’s research interests have focused mainly on studying the dynamics and control of infectious diseases using mathematical modeling and computer simulation. Dr. Gaff has worked on modeling a variety of diseases including the interaction between HSV-2 and HIV, smallpox, plague, HPV, MRSA, Rift Valley fever and others. In the spring of 2007, Dr. Gaff was awarded a Quantitative Mentored Career Development Award from NIAID-NIH to develop mathematical models of ehrlichiosis, a tick-borne disease. Dr. Gaff is a Co-Investigator on successful grants from the CDC, DHS and NSF.

Dr. Gaff is actively involved in both the Association for Women in Mathematics, as Executive Committee member and webmaster, and the Society for Mathematical Biology, as the newsletter editor and webmaster. She is an avid rugby player and is an active member for the Norfolk Storm Women’sRugby Club.

Jennifer Galovich: Jennifer Galovich is Associate Professor of Mathematics at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, where she has been on the faculty since 1986. Prior to that, she taught at St. Olaf College, Carleton College, and the University of California at Davis.

Her mathematical interests are in Combinatorics, especially distributions of statistics on words. She recently expanded her interests to include applications in Biology, especially bioinformatics (in which she has developed and taught a course for undergraduates) and has investigated connections between some questions in molecular biology and Combinatorics. She is currently the Treasurer of BioSIGMAA, a member of the Board of Governors of the MAA, and serves on the membership committee of AWM. On behalf of BioSIGMAA, she also organizes the judging for the Janet Andersen Award at Mathfest and she serves on the editorial board of ESTEEM.

Secretary

Brian Walton: The potential for mathematics to help resolve pressing biological problems and for biology to introduce interesting mathematical questions inspires my work. I greatly enjoy teaching a mathematical biology modeling course populated primarily by biology majors as well as injecting biological examples into more standard mathematics
courses. I particularly seek to find ways for undergraduate students to participate in ongoing research opportunities. My current research efforts arise from collaborations with local biology faculty where together we have identified questions that might be addressed from a mathematical perspective, including describing the changing
shape of a tadpole's jaw cartilages during metamorphosis and modeling the interactions between amphibians and the microbiota on their skin. With the MAA's focus on mathematics at the undergraduate level, I believe that BIO-SIGMAA is in an ideal position to contribute to strengthening the connections between mathematics and
biology at this collegiate level.

Program Director

René Salinas: René Salinas received his Ph.D in Mathematics in 2003 from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville under the direction of Dr. Louis J. Gross. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Appalachian State University. His research interests include spatial optimization in ecological systems and any interesting problem in theoretical ecology. He is co-organizer of the annual TIMBER Conference at Appalachian State University that focuses on undergraduate research in mathematical biology and a member of Mathematical Association of America, the Society for Mathematical Biology, and the Ecological Society of America.