Moira Chas, SUNY Stony Brook University

Undergraduate training in Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina and Ph. D thesis in the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain, studying dynamics of surface homeomorphisms. Post-doc position in CUNY Graduate Center from 1998 to 2001 and Visiting Professor Stony Brook University 2002 to present I like to study the connections between algebra and topology, trying to find new ways of making them talk to one another. After finishing my Ph D., I studied certain algebraic structures related to curves on surfaces. In particular, I designed and programmed algorithms which compute intersection numbers of curves and certain Lie algebra operations on vector spaces of free homotopy classes of curves. I used these programs to test several conjectures related to these structures. Recently, I started to think about algebraic structures of curves on three manifolds.

Natasha Dobrinen, University of Denver

Natasha Dobrinen's research interests center in set theory and reach out into Boolean algebras, topology, and recursion theory. Her past work has centered on problems related to embeddings of Cohen algebras, games and distributive laws in Boolean algebras, when a ground model is co-stationary in the $P_{\kappa}(\lambda)$ of a larger universe, homogeneous forcings, and almost everywhere dominating Turing degrees. Currently, she is interested in finding the equiconsistency strengths of combinatorial properties on large cardinals, and in combinatorial properties and classifications, or lack thereof, involving partial orderings.
Natasha Dobrinen earned her BA from UC Berkeley and her PhD from the University of Minnesota, under the supervision of Karel Prikry. She has held two postdocs, an NSF/VIGRE S. Chowla Research Assistant Professor at Penn State, with mentor Steve Simpson, and an FWF research postdoc at the Kurt Goedel Research Center for Mathematical Logic at the University of Vienna, directed by Sy-David Friedman. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Denver.

Gretchen Ostheimer, Hofstra University

Gretchen Ostheimer received her B.A. in mathematics from Wellesley College in 1979. After ten years working in industry on systems software development, she entered in graduate school, receiving her Ph.D. in mathematics under the direction of Charles Sims in 1996. After a three year assistant professorship in the mathematics department at Tufts University, she joined the computer science faculty at Hofstra University, where she is now an associate professor. Gretchen's research interests are on the boundary of group theory and theoretical computer science. Her specific interests include decidability questions, practical algorithms and relationships between group theory and formal language theory, with an emphasis in all cases on achieving a better understanding of infinite solvable groups. True to her early training, Gretchen is a tireless promoter of mathematics and computer science in liberal arts education. She uses writing to teach mathematics and computer science, and she uses mathematics and computer science to teach her students to become better writers, thinkers and communicators.

Olga Kharlampovich, McGill University

Olga Kharlampovich has concentrated on geometric and combinatorial group theory, algorithmic problems in groups, diophantine geometry over groups, and model theory. Dr. Kharlampovich is a professor of mathematics at McGill University. She was awarded a gold medal from the Soviet Academy of Sciences for her undergraduate work in solving Novikov-Adian's problem to construct finitely presented solvable groups with undecidable word problems. Olga Kharlampovich received her Ph.D. from Leningrad University and her Doctorat d'État from the Steklov Institute in Moscow in 1990. Together with her colleague Myasnikov, she solved a major problem in group theory (posed by Tarski), by proving that all nonabelian free groups have the same elementary theory and this theory is decidable (published 1999-2006).

Jennifer Taback, Bowdoin College

Jennifer Taback received her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Yale University, and her PhD from the University of Chicago, working under Benson Farb. She taught at the University of California-Berkeley and the University at Albany before joining the faculty at Bowdoin College in 2002. Her research interests include Thompson's group, the large scale geometry of groups, in particular properties which are invariant under quasi-isometry, and studying twisted conjugacy classes in groups from a geometric perspective.

Carol Wood, Wesleyan University

Carol Saunders Wood is Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics at Wesleyan University, where she has been on the faculty for 35 years. Her research interests lie in the interface between model theory and algebra. Carol was born in Pennington Gap, Virginia, received her undergraduate degree in mathematics at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, and her doctorate under the supervision of Abraham Robinson at Yale. She has been a program officer at NSF and Deputy Director at MSRI, and is a judge of the Intel Science Talent Search. She has been both department and faculty chair, and has held visiting positions at Yale, Rutgers, and Paris VII. Her service to professional societies includes a term as President of the Association of Women in Mathematics. She is presently a Trustee of the American Mathematical Society. Carol and her husband of 40+ years are the happy parents of two daughters and the delighted grandparents of two year old twins.