Welcome and Opening Remarks | Margot Gerritsen and Persis Drell | WiDS 2015

Co-Founder, WiDS Worldwide

Margot Gerritsen is a Professor at Stanford University and co-founder and co-director of WiDS Worldwide. Her expertise is in computational mathematics. She is particularly fond of computational fluid dynamics and linear algebra. Margot received her MS from TU Delft and her PhD from Stanford. Prior to her position at Stanford, she spent five years as a faculty member at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Margot was born and raised in the Netherlands and left the flat lands in 1990 in search of hillier and sunnier places. She still has her Dutch accent. She currently lives in the Oregon mountains with her partner Paul.

Provost of Stanford University

Persis Drell is the provost at Stanford University, the James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor in the School of Engineering, a professor of materials science and engineering, and a professor of physics.

Prior to her appointment as provost in February 2017, she was dean of the Stanford School of Engineering from 2014 to 2017 and director of U.S. Department of Energy SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory from 2007 to 2012.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Wellesley College and her PhD in atomic physics from UC Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2002, she was a faculty member in the physics department at Cornell University for 14 years.