Dr. Frederica Darema, a member of the Senior Executive Service, is the Director, Mathematics, Information and Life Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, Va. She provides executive direction in the planning, conduct and coordination of broad, frequently large-scale, and critical basic research and development program activities. These include the areas as advanced mathematical and computational methods for dynamic systems; information and decision systems; bio-systems; human cognition and socio-cultural systems.
Dr. Darema is a graduate of the University of Athens, Greece; the Illinois Institute of Technology; and the University of California at Davis, where she attended as a Fulbright Scholar and a Distinguished Scholar. After physics research associate positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Brookhaven National Laboratory, she received an American Physics Society Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowship and became a technical staff member in the Nuclear Sciences Department at Schlumberger-Doll Research. Subsequently, she joined the T.J. Watson IBM Research Center as a research staff member and group manager. While at IBM, she also served in the IBM Corporate Strategy Group examining and helping to set corporate-wide strategies. From 1996 to 1998, she completed a two-year interagency assignment at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Prior to her current assignment, Dr. Darema was at the National Science Foundation where she held executive level positions as Senior Science and Technology Adviser and Senior Science Analyst in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. She has given numerous keynote speeches and presentations in professional forums. Dr. Darema’s scientific and technical contributions include development of parallel applications; parallel algorithms; programming models; environments and systems performance engineering for the design of applications; and of software for parallel and distributed systems.