Juan C. Meza, Ph.D., is currently serving as the Associate Director for the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute. Prior to this, he served as Division Director at the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Sciences (2018-2022) and as Dean of the School of Natural Sciences at the University of California, Merced (2011-2017). As the Dean, he served as the primary executive officer for the School of Natural Sciences and was responsible for establishing a vision and strategy for the School; recruiting, retaining, and supporting talented faculty; and advancing diversity in all academic and administrative areas. In this capacity, he managed annual balanced budgets of more than $21 million, oversaw distribution of $30 million in graduate student support, and supervised a staff of 54. Juan also holds a position as Professor of Applied Mathematics, where his current research interests include nonlinear optimization with an emphasis on methods for parallel computing.

Prior to joining UC Merced, Juan served as Department Head and Senior Scientist for High Performance Computing Research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he led research programs in computational and data sciences. He held the position of Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories and served as the manager of the Computational Sciences and Mathematics Research department before joining Berkeley Lab.

Juan received the 2013 Rice University Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award and was named to Hispanic Business magazine’s Top 100 Influentials in the area of science. In addition, he has been elected a Fellow of the AAAS, SIAM, and AMS. In 2008 he was the recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize and the SACNAS Distinguished Scientist Award. He was also a member of the computational team that won the 2008 ACM Gordon Bell Award for Algorithm Innovation.

Juan has served on various federal advisory committees, including the National Research Council Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications, DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, and the NSF’s MPS Advisory Committee. He has also served on numerous boards and scientific advisory committees including SIAM, IPAM, ICERM, IMA, and MSRI.