UCLA's Chan Named an Assistant Director at NSF

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named Tony F. Chan, dean of physical sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, as its assistant director for mathematics and physical sciences. Beginning Oct. 1, Chan will guide and manage NSF research funding totaling approximately $1 billion a year to support astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, materials science and multidisciplinary activities. Since becoming a UCLA dean in 2001, Chan has overseen six departments and several research institutes comprising more than 200 faculty, 1700 undergraduates and 700 graduate students. The division receives over $60 million annually in research awards. Chan's current chief research interests involve interdisciplinary mathematics in such fields as image processing and computer vision, multiscale computational methods, optimization and multilevel methods for electronics design and computational geometry for brain mapping. His research is currently funded by NSF, the Office of Naval Research and the National Institutes of Health. A member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery, among other organizations, Chan has served on a number of national and professional panels and is one of five delegates representing the US at the General Assembly of the International Mathematics Union to be held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, this year.