This blog is the personal web log of
Ron Buckmire, Ph.D.
Here's a brief biography (
updated January 2021)
According to Wikipedia, Ron Buckmire
is an "American mathematician and LGBT activist." He is probably most well-known for his volunteer activities, such as creating the Queer Resources Directory, the first comprehensive directory of LGBT and HIV/AIDS information on the Internet, in 1991, before the World Wide Web was invented. The QRD was one of several named plaintiffs in a successful Supreme Court challenge to the 1996 Communications Decency Act that was ruled unconstitutional in ACLU et al. v. Reno (521 U.S. 844, 1997). In 2006, he co-founded the Barbara Jordan/Bayard Rustin Coalition, the premiere Black LGBT political organization in Los Angeles. He currently serves as immediate past Board President for the Jordan/Rustin Coalition and was an ex officio member of Board of Directors the Center for Health Justice. He has previously served on the Board of Directors of Immigration Equality,
the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Equality California and the PlanetOut Corporation. During the 2008 campaign to defeat Proposition 8, the controversial (and ultimately unconstitutional) ballot measure to amend the California constitution to prevent same-sex couples from accessing civil marriage in California, he was co-chair of the Los Angeles County No On 8 Committee.
In his day job, Ron has been on the faculty of Occidental College, Barack Obama’s first alma mater, since 1994 and is currently a Full Professor of Mathematics and Associate Dean of the College. He became an Assistant Professor in 1996, was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor in 2004 and promoted again to full Professor in 2014. His academic interests involve applied mathematics, numerical analysis, mathematics education, LGBT history and sexual orientation law. He served as chair of the mathematics department from 2005 to 2010 and again from January 2015 to July 2016. For two academic years (starting in August 2011), he was on leave from his tenured faculty position at Occidental College while serving as a Program Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) of the National Science Foundation, in Arlington, VA (Washington, D.C. metro area). There he worked on promoting excellence in undergraduate education through distribution and administration of federal grants to support projects in various programs such as S-STEM (Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), MSP (Math and Science Partnerships), STEP (STEM Talent Expansion Program) and TUES (Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM). Ron is an advocate for the incorporation of teaching with technology in the classroom and the practice of using active learning techniques to improve the teaching of mathematics. He is active in efforts to reform the teaching and learning of algebra in local schools nearby Occidental College in northeast Los Angeles. He has been recognized for his work serving as a role model for other out LGBT professionals in STEM careers. In summer of 2016, Ron became a federal employee and returned to the National Science Foundation as a program officer in DUE with lead responsibility for the S-STEM program. In August 2018, acknowledging the strain of maintaining a bicoastal work-life balance, he resigned from NSF and returned to Occidental College as the inaugural Associate Dean of the College for Curricular Affairs and Director of the Core Program.
In addition to his professional career, Ron has long been a passionate advocate for equity, diversity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). He has served on multiple committees of every major national mathematics association (AMS, MAA, SIAM, etc) devoted to broadening participation by historically underrepresented minorities in mathematics for years. In 2021, he became the first Vice-President for Equity, Diversity & Inclusion at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the first chair of the American Mathematical Society (AMS)'s policy Committee on Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (CoEDI). He also serves as the Chair of the Human Resources Advisory Committee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and is on the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Computation and Experimental Mathematics (ICERM). He is one of the co-founders of Spectra, the association for LGBT mathematicians (and their allies).
Ron lives in the Montecito Hills section of Los Angeles (near Highland Park, Hermon, South Pasadena, El Sereno and Montecito Heights) with his legally married spouse Dean Elzinga. He now blogs irregularly at MadProfessah.com; You can follow his tweets at twitter.com/madprofessah or connect with him on LinkedIn or Instagram.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed on this blog do not reflect the views of Ron Buckmire's employer(s).
