Two leaders join Board of Governors for Argonne

The University has named Deborah Wince-Smith and Mary Fanett Wheeler to its Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory.

The University, which operates Argonne for the Department of Energy, selects new board members from faculty, administrators and trustees of the University, as well as from other universities, national and international organizations, and from industry.

Wince-Smith is president of the Council on Competitiveness, and Fanett Wheeler is a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, petroleum and geosystems engineering, and the Ernest and Virginia Cockrell chair of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

“We are very grateful to these highly distinguished leaders in their respective fields for agreeing to serve on the Board of Governors,” said Thomas Rosenbaum, Vice President for Research and for Argonne National Laboratory. “These appointments further strengthen the laboratory’s commitment to keep the United States globally competitive through innovation, collaboration and world-class multidisciplinary research and development.”

Wince-Smith, an internationally recognized expert on science and technology policy, innovation strategy, regional economic development and global competition, serves on a number of boards and committees, including the Board of Directors of the NASDAQ Stock Market, the National Science Board’s Task Force on Transformative Research, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board’s Task Force on Nuclear Power, the National Research Council’s Committee on Innovation Models for Aerospace Technologies, the University of California President’s Council for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National laboratories, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

She is a trustee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and a national juror for the MIT Lemelson Award for Invention. Wince-Smith was most recently nominated by President Bush to serve as a member of the Oversight Board of the Internal Revenue Service.

In 2004, Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez appointed her chairman of the Federal Advisory Committee of his Strengthening America’s Communities Initiative, which produced the first detailed assessment of federal investment and policy in regional economic development in almost 40 years.

From 1989 to 1993, Wince-Smith served as the first Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy in the Department of Commerce Technology Administration to develop technology policies and national initiatives to strengthen U.S. productivity and economic competitiveness.

She has served on White House policy councils, chaired the Interagency Committee on Federal Technology Transfer and directed the President’s National Technology Initiative. She also was the U.S. representative to the multilateral Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Consortium with government and private sector leaders from the United States, Europe, Japan and Canada.

Wince-Smith earned her B.A. from Vassar College and received her M.A. from King’s College, Cambridge University.

Wheeler, a world-renowned expert in massive parallel processing, became a faculty member of the University of Texas at Austin in 1995. She is presently director of that institution’s Center for Subsurface Modeling in the Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics.

Her research interests include numerical solution of partial differential systems with application to the modeling of subsurface and surface flows, and parallel computation.

Wheeler’s applications include multiphase flow and geomechanics in reservoir engineering, contaminant transport in groundwater, bays and estuaries, and angiogenesis in biomedical engineering. Her current work employs state-of-the-art numerical and analytical methods to model the dynamic and chemical behavior of fluids—oil and water primarily—in a variety of subsurface geological and aqueous environments. A primary goal of her research is to improve the modeling of these environments by conducting their simulations on massively paralleled computing platforms.

She is currently an editor of nine technical journals, managing editor of Computational Geosciences, and a founding member of the SIAM Activity Group in Geosciences. In 1998 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

She obtained a B.S. in social sciences, a B.A. in mathematics and a M.A. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. She obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics from Rice University where she worked for 24 years before moving to the University of Texas at Austin.