NASEM study speaker bios:

Karen Willcox, https://oden.utexas.edu/people/directory/karen-willcox/

Karen E. Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Associate Vice President for Research, and Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. At UT, she holds the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences and the Peter O'Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems. Before joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering and the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and in 2017 was appointed Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) for services to aerospace engineering and education. In 2022 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Willcox is at the forefront of the development and application of computational methods for design, optimization and control of next-generation engineered systems. A number of her active research projects and collaborations with industry are developing core mathematical and computational capabilities to achieve predictive digital twins at scale.

Caroline Chung, https://faculty.mdanderson.org/profiles/caroline_chung.html

Dr. Chung is vice president and Chief Data Officer and is an associate professor in Radiation Oncology and Diagnostic Imaging. Her clinical practice is focused on CNS malignancies and her computational imaging lab has a research focus on quantitative imaging and computational modeling to detect and characterize tumors and toxicities of treatment to enable personalized cancer treatment. Internationally, Dr. Chung is actively involved in multidisciplinary efforts to improve the generation and utilization of high quality, standardized imaging to facilitate quantitative imaging integration for clinical impact across multiple institutions, including Vice Chair of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Quantitative Imaging Biomarker Alliance (QIBA) and Co-Chair of the Quantitative Imaging for Assessment of Response in Oncology Committee of the International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements (ICRU). Beyond her clinical, research and administrative roles, Dr. Chung enjoys serving as an active educator and mentor with a passion to support the growth of diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM, including her role as Chair of Women in Cancer (http://www.womenincancer.com), a non-for-profit organization that is committed to advancing cancer care by encouraging the growth, leadership and connectivity of current and future oncologists, trainees and medical researchers. Her recent publications include work on building digital twins for clinical oncology.