Executive Committee
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is governed by an Executive Committee consisting of the President, President-elect or Past President, Treasurer, Clerk, Newsletter Editor and Associate Editor, Meetings Coordinator, Media Coordinator and eight At-Large Members. Members of the Executive Committee (EC) are either elected or appointed by the President.
Talitha M. Washington
Clark Atlanta University and Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative
Washington is a professor of mathematics at Clark Atlanta University and the inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative. In her role as Director, she oversees and provides strategic direction and coordination of data science education, research, and outreach as well as development and fundraising activities across Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library. Her research interests include the applications of differential equations to problems in biology and engineering, as well as the development of nonstandard finite difference schemes to numerically solve dynamical systems. Washington is a former Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Convergence Accelerator. Previously, as a Program Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education, she was instrumental in building and establishing NSF’s first Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program, which funded $85M over two years to 56 HSIs. She previously held positions at Howard University, the University of Evansville, The College of New Rochelle, and Duke University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Spelman College, and Master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Connecticut. In 2021, Washington became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Association for Women in Mathematics, becoming the first person named a Fellow of both of these organizations in the same year.
Kathryn Leonard
Occidental College
Kathryn Leonard is Professor and Founding Chair of Computer Science at Occidental College. Before that, she was a member of the Mathematics Department and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at CSU Channel Islands, the newest member of the Cal State system. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Applied and Computational Mathematics department at Caltech after finishing her PhD in Mathematics at Brown University. She is the director of the NSF-funded Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics, which received the 2015 Programs that Make a Difference award from the AMS. She received a 2013 Henry L. Alder Award for Excellence in Teaching from the MAA and an AWM Service Award in 2015. She previously served on the AWM Executive Committee as chair of the Meetings Portfolio. She is a member of the Oversight Committee for AWM’s ADVANCE grant, serves as chair of its Research Networks Committee, and is on the leadership teams of the Women in the Science of Data and Mathematics (WiSDM) and Women in Shape Modeling (WiSH) Research Networks. Her research interests are in geometric modeling for computer vision and computer graphics, and she has coedited two Springer volumes in that area. She is a coauthor with actor Misha Collins, who plays Castiel on the TV show Supernatural.
Mary Shepherd
Northwest Missouri State University
Mary Shepherd is Professor of Mathematics at Northwest Missouri State University where she has been since 2001. Currently, she is on sabbatical and is a Visiting Professor at Arizona State University. Her research interests started in differential geometry and have continued into undergraduate mathematics education, particularly in reading mathematics where she has several publications. She has also worked in mathematics as created in needlework where she has chapters in three books. She earned an undergraduate degree in music performance (clarinet) from Missouri State University in 1976, a Masters of Accountancy from the University of Oklahoma in 1987 and a Masters and PhD in Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1996. She initially taught at SUNY–Potsdam from 1996 to 2001. She is a Project NExT fellow (Peach Dot–1997) and helped found the Missouri Section NExT program. She has been Secretary/Treasurer, Chair, and Governor/Section Representative of the Missouri Section of the MAA. She has also served on the EC of the MAA as the Budget and Audit member (2008–2010) and after reorganization of the MAA EC, continued to serve as the appointed person on the Audit Committee of the Board of Governors until 2018. Mary is currently a member of the CTUM Committee of the MAA and was involved with the writing and publication of the Instructional Practices Guide of the MAA. Prior to returning to school to pursue mathematics, she was an accountant at various private companies, most recently at Hertz Rent-A-Car. She passed the CPA exam in 1987.
Alejandra Alvarado
Eastern Illinois University
Alejandra Alvarado is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eastern Illinois University. Her research interests are in number theory, in particular, elliptic curves. She recently spent three years working for the Navy as a research scientist. She is also committed to the increase and advancement of women and underserved students in the mathematical sciences. She has served on the AWM Meetings Portfolio and MathFest Committees.
Anne Leggett
Loyola University of Chicago
Anne Leggett is Professor Emerita of Mathematics, Loyola University Chicago, where she spent the lion’s share of her academic career. She earned her Ph.D. in recursion theory from Yale, but over the years her professional interests became more and more centered on issues involving women in the mathematical sciences. She is long-time AWM Newsletter Editor, and with Bettye Anne Case she co-edited (and co-wrote portions of) the prize-winning book Complexities: Women in Mathematics (Princeton University Press, 2005). She joined Sarah J. Greenwald and Jill E. Thomley in writing the article “The Association for Women in Mathematics: How and Why It Was Founded, and Why It’s Still Needed in the 21st Century” which appeared in the September 2015 issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer. She is working (somewhat sporadically) on a database of women mathematicians who earned doctorates in the mathematical sciences and related subjects from 1960 to 1979; she gave an invited talk on this work at the October 2015 AMS Sectional Meeting held on the Loyola campus.
Sarah J. Greenwald
Appalachian State University
Sarah Greenwald is a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and Faculty Affiliate and Former Interim Director of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at Appalachian State University. She received a Bachelor’s degree from Union College and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where her doctoral work was in Riemannian geometry. Greenwald joined the faculty at Appalachian in 1998. Currently she investigates connections between mathematics and society, such as women, minorities, and popular culture.
In 2010 Greenwald was awarded the Wayne D. Duncan Appalachian State University Faculty Enrichment and Teaching Fellowship, which recognizes innovative and successful teaching in Appalachian’s General Education program. She has won several other awards for teaching, scholarship and service, most recently a 2018 Association for Women in Mathematics Service Award. She co-edited the 3-volume Encyclopedia of Mathematics & Society, which was named a “Best Reference 2011” by Library Journal and the 2018 AWM Springer volume 10, Women in Mathematics: Celebrating the Centennial of the Mathematical Association of America.
Greenwald has served as an At-Large Member of the Executive Committee, has chaired the Policy and Advocacy Committee, and has served in many other capacities. She has been the Associate Editor of the AWM Newsletter since 2011. She begins a term on the Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences in February 2019.
Alina Ioana Bucur
University of California at San Diego
Alina Ioana Bucur works in arithmetic statistics, the study of number-theoretic objects in aggregates, rather than in isolation. Currently, she is focused on effective bounds on the distribution of Frobenius eigen-values of abelian varieties over number fields, and the behavior of L-functions of families of curves of varying genus over a fixed finite field.
Professor Bucur is a member of the steering committee for WINN (Women in Numbers Network), a professional development group for women mathematicians who are interested in Number Theory; WINN is the model for the research networks supported by the AWM NSF ADVANCE grant. She has served on the AWM Mentor Network Committee since 2015. She began her term as AWM Meetings Coordinator in August of 2018.
Denise A. Rangel Tracy
Farleigh Dickinson University
Denise Rangel Tracy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Farleigh Dickinson University. Tracy received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina Greensboro and a PhD from the University of Texas Arlington. She did a post-doc at Syracuse University. Tracy has a deep commitment to the work of the Media Committee and her unflagging efforts to portray AWM positively in the media. Tracy has obtained funding for and led Wikipedia Edit-a-thons at both the Joint Math Meetings and the AWM Research Symposium. She initiated the AWM Playing Cards Project and tracked down and created preliminary lists and data on over a thousand women for that project.
Carla Cotwright-Williams
Department of Defense
Dr. Carla Cotwright-Williams works with the Department of Defense (DoD) on a 12-month detail with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) as the Acting Chief of Data & AI. Prior to working with the DoD, she began her public service in academia—serving over 10 years in research and teaching. She has conducted research with both NASA and the U.S. Navy.
She was the 2012–2013 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Congressional Fellow. During her time on Capitol Hill, she worked as a staffer on the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and a House personal office.
She has served as the 2015 Hardy-Apfel Information Technology (IT) Fellow at the U.S. Social Security Administration in Baltimore, MD. As an IT Fellow, Cotwright-Williams worked on a variety of high-profile IT projects including creating fraud analytics in the Office of Anti-Fraud Programs and the launch of SSA’s cloud infrastructure (Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)) whose primary goal is to improve accessibility to a critical asset, its data.
Cotwright-Williams has been an invited speaker and panelist across the nation speaking to diverse audiences about her research, career transitions, and mentoring.
Cotwright-Williams holds a PhD in Mathematics and serves as the Outside Academia Representative for the National Association of Mathematicians.
She has received a 2019 Women of Color STEM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions in Government.
Donatella Danielli-Garofalo
Arizona State University
Donatella Danielli is a professor of Mathematics and the Director of the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU in January 2021, Danielli was a professor of Mathematics at Purdue University. She received a Laurea cum Laude in Mathematics from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1989. She completed her doctorate in 1999 at Purdue University under the supervision of Carlos E. Kenig. Prior to joining the Purdue faculty in 2001, she held positions at The Johns Hopkins University and at the Institut Mittag-Leffler in Sweden. She was also a Visiting Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK, in 2014. Her research is in the areas of Partial Differential Equations, Calculus of Variations and Geometric Measure Theory, with specific emphasis on free boundary problems arising from physics and engineering. She was the recipient of an NSF-CAREER Award in 2003. She was awarded a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Mathematics in 2014, and became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2017. In 2020 Danielli was named a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics “for her generous and consistent involvement in, and remarkable impact on, a large number of excellent local, national, and international initiatives to support interest and involvement of women in mathematics at all levels; and for remarkable, pioneering contributions positioning her as a role model for more junior mathematicians, particularly women.”
Elena Fuchs
UC Davis
Elena Fuchs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Davis. She received her BA in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2005 and her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 2010, advised by Peter Sarnak. She then held postdoc positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and at UC Berkeley, and a tenure track position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before moving to her dream university (UC Davis) in 2016. Her research is in number theory, at the intersection of analytic number theory, geometric group theory, and dynamical ystems. She is a 2016 Sloan Research Fellow and has also been funded by the NSF. She has been a plenary speaker at several major research conferences and has presented her work at dozens of mathematics seminars and conferences, both within the US and internationally.
Fuchs is also committed to outreach and service. At UC Davis, she founded M-PACT, a program connecting the UC Davis mathematics department to Smythe Academy, a middle school in an extremely impoverished and under-privileged school district in Sacramento. This program brings a group of UC Davis mathematics students and faculty (including Fuchs herself) to the school on a weekly basis, not only to show the Smythe students a side of math that they do not have access to at school through games and hands-on activities, but also to form connections between the middle schoolers and people at UC Davis. The program also has a mentoring aspect to it, where middle schoolers are invited to the UCD campus to meet UCD undergraduates who are first generation students coming from situations that are similar to their own. Both within and outside of her university, Fuchs has always been involved with efforts to make mathematics more inclusive of women. She has organized and participated in several conferences and workshops aimed at women, some of which were backed by AWM, and some by WIN (Women in Numbers). From 2017–2019, she served on the AWM Awards Committee. She is also a mother of two wonderful children, born in 2013 and 2018.
Rebecca Garcia
Sam Houston State University and MSRI-UP
Rebecca E. Garcia is a professor of mathematics at Sam Houston State University and Co-Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Undergraduate Program (MSRI-UP). She is native Chamorro, born and raised in Guam, and, as far as she knows, is the first Chamorro to earn a doctoral degree in pure mathematics. Her research interests are at the intersection of computational and commutative algebra and combinatorics, with contributions in computational algebraic combinatorics, theory of sandpile groups, and dimension theory of partially ordered sets.
Her record of service reflects her love for her community and a commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. She is dedicated to growing the community of indigenous mathematicians through mentoring and research program for undergraduates and through collaborative efforts on IndigenousMathematicians.org, a website and community dedicated to spotlighting the journey and mathematical contributions of indigenous mathematicians including Native Americans, Native Alaskans, Native Hawai`ians, and Native Pacific Islanders.
Rebecca is an active member of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.
Courtney Gibbons
Hamilton College
Courtney Gibbons is an associate professor of mathematics at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. She received her BA in mathematics from Colorado College and her MS and PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her dissertation work was in commutative homological algebra. She continues to explore this area while developing secondary research interests in algebraic statistics and other applications of algebra. While working at Hamilton, she taught a course in a nearby men’s medium-security prison and looks forward to returning post-pandemic.
As a professor at a small liberal arts college, Courtney works with colleagues from many disciplines in many capacities. She has spent several years on the college’s Committee on Academic Policy, which she will chair next year as the committee implements recommendations from the President’s DEI Advisory Council.
Courtney recently completed a three-year term on the AWM’s Policy and Advocacy Committee, serving as chair for most of the 2020–2021 term. In her year as chair, the committee authored roughly a dozen responses and endorsements.
Caroline Klivans 
Brown University
Caroline J. Klivans received a BA degree in mathematics from Cornell University and a PhD in applied mathematics from MIT. Currently, she is an associate professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. She is also currently a Deputy Director at ICERM, the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics. Before coming to Brown she held positions at MSRI, Cornell and the University of Chicago.
Klivans’ research is in algebraic, geometric and topological combinatorics. She is the author of the book The Mathematics of Chip-Firing (CRC Press publications). She serves on the editorial board of Algebraic Combinatorics and has organized and chaired various scientific conferences including the international conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC) and American Mathematical Society special sessions. She currently serves as chair of the AMS David P. Robbins prize committee.
Klivans is the 9th annual AWM Alice T. Schafer prize winner. She has previously served on the Schafer prize committee and currently serves on the AWM policy and advocacy committee.
Michelle Snider
IDA/Center for Computing Sciences
Michelle Snider is a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Center for Computing Sciences (CCS) in Bowie, Maryland. She received her BA in mathematics and physics from Smith College, her MA in mathematics from the University of California San Diego, and her PhD from Cornell University. Her thesis work was in algebraic combinatorics, in which she studied objects including Grassmannians, positroid varieties, and (combinatorial) pipe dreams.
Michelle works with mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, physicists, and others to help solve the National Security Agency’s critical challenges. During her eight years at CCS, Michelle has co-authored over ten classified research papers. She has spent several years as coordinator and lead for an annual summer-long workshop, in which researchers from academia, industry, and government form multidisciplinary teams focusing on selected research problems of current importance.
Michelle is currently the Chair of the AWM’s Government Advocacy Committee, where she organizes the AWM’s Capitol Hill Visits, including the most recent visit coinciding with the JMM in Baltimore. During this Hill Day, 50 AWM members met with 47 members of Congress in one afternoon. She received the 2018 AWM Service Award for her efforts on the new and improved AWM website. She is also a certified Les Mills instructor in Sh’bam, an energetic aerobic dance class.
Shanise Walker
University of Wisconsin Eau Claire
Shanise Walker is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire (UWEC). Her research interests lie in combinatorics where she studies extremal combinatorics and graph partitioning problems. She earned her BS in mathematics from the University of Georgia and her PhD from Iowa State University. Upon graduating from Iowa State University, she was a Project NExT Fellow for the 2018–2019 year. At UWEC, Walker co-organizes the annual Sonia Kovalevsky Day event for middle and high school girls and has served on the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan Committee. She is also on the editorial board for the Mathematical Association of America Math Values Blog, which highlights diversity, inclusion, and community in mathematics.