Juan C. Meza, Ph.D., is currently serving as the Division Director at the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Sciences. Prior to this position, he served as Dean of the School of Natural Sciences at the University of California, Merced. 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; enhancing the academic profile and scholarly impact of the School; 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 and was the 2008 recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize and the SACNAS Distinguished Scientist Award. He was also a member of the team that won the 2008 ACM Gordon Bell Award for Algorithm Innovation.

Juan has served on numerous external boards and federal advisory committees, including the National Research Council Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications, DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, the Boards of Trustees for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and SIAM, and the Board of Governors for the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.