Claudia Neuhauser, PhD, is Associate Vice President for Research and Director of Research Computing in the Office of the Vice President for Research at University of Minnesota. In her role as Director of Research Computing she oversees the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute (UMII), the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI), and U-Spatial. UMII fosters and accelerates data-intensive research across all disciplines in the University and develops partnership with industry.  Neuhauser’s research is at the interface of mathematics and biology, and focuses on the analysis of ecological and evolutionary models and the development of statistical methods in biomedical applications. She received her Diplom in mathematics from the Universität Heidelberg (Germany) in 1988, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University in 1990. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Marcus Roper, PhD, is a Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. He specializes in developing mathematical models inspired by physics and biology. His particular research interests include biological transport networks, such as fungal mycelia and the microvascular system. Although many of the projects he works on are experimentally inspired, his goal is to develop new image analysis methods and to gain a better understanding of the world around us.