Keynote Speakers

Dr. Edward Burger is President and CEO of the St. David’s Foundation, and President Emeritus of Southwestern University as well as Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and a leader on thinking, innovation, and creativity. Previously he was the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College. He has delivered over 700 addresses worldwide at venues including Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins as well as at the Smithsonian Institution, Microsoft Corporation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the New York Public Library, and the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of over 70 research articles, books, and video series (starring in over 8,000 on-line videos), including the book The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, published by Princeton University Press and translated into over a dozen languages worldwide. His latest book, Making Up Your Mind: Thinking Effectively Through Creative Puzzle-Solving, also published by Princeton University Press, was on several of Amazon’s Hot New Releases lists.

In 2006, Reader’s Digest listed Burger in their annual “100 Best of America” as America’s Best Math Teacher. In 2010 he was named the winner of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching—the largest prize in higher education teaching across all disciplines in the English-speaking world. The Huffington Post named him one of their Game Changers” and Microsoft Worldwide Education selected him as one of their “Global Heroes in Education.” In 2013, Burger was inducted as an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. His program, Higher ED, produced by NPR’s Austin affiliate KUT is available at kut.org/topic/higher-ed/ and on iTunes

Hortensia Soto is a Professor at Colorado State University. Her research centers on the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics where she adopts an embodied cognition perspective. Thus, she creates mathematical environments where students engage in mathematics in an embodied way before they engage with it formally. Hortensia has mentored young women and promoted mathematics via summer outreach programs. She has facilitated professional development for K-16 teachers in Nebraska, Colorado, and California. She is a recipient of the MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College of University Teaching of Mathematics.

Hortensia is a working member of the MAA. She served as the Associate Treasurer, the Associate Secretary, as an editor of the MAA Instructional Practices Guide, and currently serves as MAA President. She enjoys hiking, practicing yoga, meditating, reading, and most of all spending time with her son Miguel. 

Talithia Williams, PhD, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Clinic Director, develops statistical models which emphasize the spatial and temporal structure of data, and applies them to problems in the environment. She has partnered with the World Health Organization in developing a cataract model used to predict the cataract surgical rate for countries in Africa. Her research interests also include nonstationary covariance estimation and change-of-support problem. Williams takes sophisticated numerical concepts and makes them understandable and relatable to everyone. As illustrated in her popular TedTalk, “Own Your Body’s Data,” she demystifies the mathematical process in amusing and insightful ways, using statistics as a way of seeing the world in a new light and transforming our future through the bold new possibilities inherent in the STEM fields. As an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, she has made it her life’s work to get people—students, parents, educators and community members—more excited about the possibilities inherent in a STEM education. Williams received her B.S. in mathematics from Spelman College, master’s degrees in both mathematics from Howard University and statistics from Rice University, and a PhD in statistics from Rice University. Her professional experiences include research appointments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the National Security Agency (NSA), and NASA.