On October 4th, 2024, the Mathematics Development Advisory Board convened at Alice Campbell Alumni Center in Urbana, IL for its 15th annual meeting.
The MDAB is comprised of several UIUC mathematics alumni who collaborate with LAS advancement officers and special liaisons from the math department. The board advises math leadership on important areas of growth and development such as student success, alumni engagement, and fundraising. The board has also been fundamental in developing our upcoming MATH Talks series.
At this year’s annual meeting, mathematics department leadership shared the most recent data on enrollment trends, post-graduation outcomes, and admissions. They also discussed the progress for the ongoing Altgeld & Illini Hall project and future possibilities for the Illinois Mathematics Lab (IML). Members George Akst, Jerome Casey, and Bill Perry ended their term with MDAB, and the board welcomed three new inductees:
Scott Fisher
Scott Fisher received his BS and MS at the University of Illinois. His career has covered executive leadership, program management, engineering, and large systems experience in manufacturing, high tech, and healthcare environments. He has also given back by mentoring students at several universities and companies, serving on the board of several non-profit organizations, and presenting at two universities.
After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Illinois, Fisher landed at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he contributed to the VAX/VMS operating system, the PDP-11 minicomputer, and the DEC system line of servers. Later, Fisher served as Director of Information Technology at Philips NV and Remmele Engineering implementing Enterprise Resource Planning systems at each company.
Most recently, Fisher worked at Ecolab, a global leader in food, water, hygiene, and energy technologies and services. He managed the Minnesota company’s IT group, supporting its largest sales division. His team developed software to collect data from industrial controllers, and managed chemistry and regulatory data.
Elaine McGrath
Elaine’s love for learning and teaching began in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Nebraska. She went on to graduate from the University of Nebraska with a B.S. in Education, and then, with a National Science Foundation scholarship, she pursued a master’s degree in mathematics while working as a teaching assistant with an office in Altgeld Hall. A bonus of her time there was meeting her husband, an EE/CS student.
Elaine and her new husband moved to Plainfield, Illinois, where she taught seventh and eighth grade math at the nearby middle school and coached the math team. While with district 202, she served on the district curriculum committee. When the district adopted an NSF-funded curriculum written by the math department at the University of Wisconsin Madison, she spent several weeks there training to teach Math in Context. She then went on to train math teachers in the Philadelphia Public Schools and several other districts across the country to teach this problem-based curriculum.
She retired in 2010 giving her and her husband time to travel in the U.S. and abroad. They’ve made many road trips to San Francisco to visit their daughter and to Longmont, Colorado to visit their other daughter. Fortunately, their son, his wife, and their grandson live in Chicago so they can see them more often.
Kelly Yancey
Kelly Yancey is a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses - Center for Computing Sciences (IDA/CCS). CCS is one of three centers that comprise IDA's Center for Communications and Computing FFRDC; the centers were founded to be a bridge between the excellence of academia and the needs of NSA. She has been working as a mathematical researcher at IDA/CCS since 2016 where her research interests include ergodic theory, graph theory, number theory, linear algebra, and automata theory.
Prior to working at IDA/CCS she earned her PhD from the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2013 and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland in the Dynamical Systems group. Kelly is an enthusiastic supporter of women in mathematics, and she loves the UIUC math department and looks forward to being on the MDAB again.
Since its inception, the MDAB has been serving the department and has helped implement opportunities for students, faculty, and alumni. Members of the board will continue to meet in subcommittees throughout the year as they work to promote the growth and wellbeing of the math department.