Dr. Peter Monk, UNIDEL Chair Professor of Mathematics, has been appointed interim chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences following the resignation of Dr. Philip Broadbridge. Professor Monk has been in the faculty of the Department since 1983. His research is in numerical analysis, computational electromagnetism, computational acoustics and inverse scattering. He is the author of Finite Element Methods for Maxwell's Equations, published by Oxford University Press in 2003, and of more than 100 articles published in journals and conference proceedings.

Dr. Philip Broadbridge served as chair since January of 2002 when he moved from his native Australia to the US. Despite his love for his job at the University, he decided to return to Australia where his two adult children live, following his and his wife's Alice desire not to live so far from their children and their future grandchildren. The Broadbridges will be moving to Melbourne where he will be the Director of The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI). AMSI is a national centre that encompasses all of mathematical sciences, including pure and applied mathematics, statistics and mathematics education. Its employees are attached to University of Melbourne, in much the same way that the employees of the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA) are attached to the University of Minnesota. The institute has a close relationship with the Centre for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems (MASCOS) and the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics (ICE-EM). All three are housed on the same street in Melbourne.