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Ruth Williams holds the Charles Lee Powell Chair in Mathematics I at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She is a mathematician who works in probability theory, especially on stochastic processes and their applications. She is particularly known for her foundational work on reflecting diffusion processes in domains with corners, for co-development with Maury Bramson of a systematic approach to proving heavy traffic limit theorems for multiclass queueing networks, and for the development of fluid and diffusion approximations for the analysis and control of more general stochastic networks, including those described by measure-valued processes. Her current research includes the study of stochastic models of complex networks, for example, those arising in Internet congestion control and systems biology.

Williams studied mathematics at the University of Melbourne where she earned her Bachelor of Science (Honours) and Master of Science degrees. She then studied at Stanford University where she earned her Ph.D. degree in Mathematics. She had a postdoc at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York before taking up a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She has remained at UCSD during her career, where she is now a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics.

Ruth Williams is an Elected Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is also a Fellow of St. Hilda's College at the University of Melbourne, and received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from La Trobe University in Australia. Williams has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator. She delivered a 45-minute invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998. In 2007, Williams received the Best Publication Award of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, jointly with Amber Puha and H. Christian Gromoll. In 2012, Williams served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a major international professional society for the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of probability and statistics. In 2016, Williams was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, jointly with Martin I. Reiman.

Dr. Debi Kilb is a Project Scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she specializes in crustal seismology research.  Her current research has an emphasis on understanding the underlying source physics of earthquakes and how one earthquake can influence another.  Kilb plays an active role in education and outreach at Scripps, participating in more than 25 events each year. She cofounded the Scripps Graduate Student Visualization contest and founded the annual Teacher Earthquake Education workshop (now in its 12th year). When media request information about noteworthy earthquakes, locally and globally, Kilb is often the responding Scripps scientist.

Kilb is also the Science Outreach Director at Sally Ride Science.  In this capacity she hires instructors and vets classes for the annual Sally Ride Science Summer Academy (>450 students/year), in addition to teaching the 'Music of Earthquakes' class for the Academy.  Kilb is also integral in the Library NExT program, which is a partnership between Sally Ride Science and the local San Diego Libraries.  Library NExT is providing free classes to middle school and high school students at 10 select San Diego Libraries (>700 students reached in 2017).

Born in Schenectady, New York, Kilb received a B.A. in mathematics and computer science, with a minor in music, from UCSD. She received a master’s degree in applied mathematics from UCLA, and a Ph.D. from the University of Memphis, specializing in seismology. She served as a graduate intern at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, and then joined Scripps, initially as a postdoctoral fellow in 2001.

Dr. Pamela C. Cosman received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.  Since 1995, she is on the faculty of the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UCSD where she is currently a Professor.  Her administrative and editorial positions include Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (2006-2008), Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (2006-2009), ECE Department Vice-Chair (2012-2014), and Associate Dean for Students (2013-2016) of the Jacobs School of Engineering.  She has published over 250 papers in the areas of image/video compression and processing and wireless communications, as well as one children’s book (The Secret Code Menace, Ransom, UK, 2016) for ages 8 to 11, which introduces error correction coding and other concepts from wireless communications through a fictional story.

Dr. Cosman is Co-Director of the UC San Diego Center for Research on Gender in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine that fosters rigorous social scientific research to create more equitable and productive workplaces.  For 6 years, she has served as the Faculty Equity Adviser for the Jacobs School of Engineering, and she is the UCSD Principal Investigator on an NSF S-STEM consortium grant (2016-2019) to support low-income freshman engineering students. For her efforts to promote diversity in STEM fields, Prof. Cosman was awarded the 2016 UC San Diego Affirmative Action and Diversity Award, and the 2017 Athena Pinnacle Award (Individual in Education). She is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi, and a Fellow of the IEEE.