Sven Leyffer, a senior computational mathematician in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, has been elected secretary of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM). His four-year term will begin Oct. 1, 2015.

ICIAM has member societies from all over the world and runs the largest applied mathematics conference every four years. The secretary maintains the records of the organization in cooperation with the ICIAM president and in accordance with the decisions made by the ICIAM board.

Leyffer obtained his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Dundee, Scotland. After postdoctoral research positions at Dundee, Argonne, and Northwestern University, he joined the MCS Division at Argonne in 2002. In 2006, Leyffer (with two colleagues) received the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, which is awarded only once every three years. He is also a SIAM fellow and a senior fellow of the University of Chicago/Argonne Computation Institute.

Leyffer’s research interests include the development of reliable methods for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems and the implementation and analysis of filter-type algorithms. He is extending nonlinear optimization methodologies to emerging areas such as mixed-integer nonlinear optimization and optimization problems with complementarity constraints.