As the new chair of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Old Dominion University, I appreciate your interest in becoming a member of our faculty. We are recruiting two new faculty members at the Assistant Professor Rank to start in August 2000. We anticipate several additional openings, due to attrition, in the first five years of the new decade. There is also a strong possibility that positions will be added to the Department as part of a multi-department strategic thrust in computational simulation at ODU.

Located in the College of Sciences, the Department is presently home to 30 faculty and staff and 30 full-time graduate students pursuing degrees in Computational and Applied Mathematics or Statistics/Biostatistics. In any given semester, we enroll approximately 3,000 students in approximately 70 sections of undergraduate and graduate courses. Each semester, two or three of our undergraduate courses are available through ODU's Teletechnet distance education program.

Students and researchers in the department have access to world-class computational facilities at the laboratories of sponsors, as well as a 32-processor SUN Starfire cluster operated by the Office of Computing Services at ODU, and SGI Origin and Onyx platforms operated by other departments in the College of Sciences. The just-endowed Richard F. Barry Mathematics & Statistics Colloquium will be bringing national leaders in computational and applied mathematics and statistics to the Department.

Principal sources of external support are the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the NASA Langley Research Center, and the Eastern Virginia Medical School. I, myself, am heavily involved in DOE's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative and NASA's High Performance Computing Program, and am looking for new colleagues who are similarly inclined to seek out and work on the mathematical problems of the applied research community.

I moved to ODU in 1993 as an Associate Professor of Computer Science and helped build up major funded programs in Computational Science during the past six years, attracting three million dollars in federal support for research and graduate training in High Performance Computing. Over this period, it has become increasingly clear to me that, as a research community, we are coming up against limits in computer hardware and in the ability of humans to interact with large data sets generated by simulations in traditional ways. The next generation of advances must increasingly rely on mathematical breakthroughs.

ODU is a great place to pursue this agenda, in a Mathematics & Statistics Department that is chartered as computational and applied. The University administration is responsive to initiatives and bold in experimentation. The University was primarily an undergraduate college until the 1980s, but achieved Carnegie "Doctoral I" status six years ago and is "Research II"-bound.

The Hampton Roads community is vibrantly international, conveniently located for collaborations with a variety of federal agencies, and family-friendly (with a low cost of living -- compare real estate prices with any other major coastal metropolitan area). Culturally, it has one of everthing, and Washington, D.C. is not far. The Outer Banks of North Carolina and the Shenandoah are easy weekend trips. The Norfolk International Airport connects directly to eleven east coast and midwestern hub airports and has just announced a major expansion.

Please visit our departmental home page, and feel free to contact any member of our faculty for answers to questions pursuant to your application or other matters of mutual interest. Professor Hideaki Kaneko, the Chair of the Search Committee, and I would be pleased to respond to logistical questions, in particular.

Best wishes,

David E. Keyes
Richard F. Barry Chair of Mathematics & Statistics