Dr Francisco de Melo Viríssimo AMIMA
London School of Economics and Political Science
Governance Roles :
Early Career Mathematicians Committee Role
The Immediate Past Chair’s role is to support and advise the new Chair and Committee, and provide continuity to the running of the Committee and Group as a whole.
Francisco graduated with a BSc in Pure Mathematics (2011) and an MSc in Applied Mathematics (2014), both from the University of São Paulo, and with a PhD in Mathematics (2018) from the University of Bath. Following his PhD, he spent a few years as a Research Scientist at the National Oceanography Centre, working primarily on the modelling of marine biogeochemical systems such as the ocean’s carbon pump. Since November 2021, he has been a Research Officer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, as part of their Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
He first joined the IMA in 2015 as a Student Member. Between 2016 and 2018, he was the President of the University of Bath Chapter of SIAM, which became a joint SIAM-IMA Chapter in March 2017. Since August 2018 he has been serving in the IMA’s Early Career Mathematicians’ (ECM) Committee: first as Vice Chair and Chair Designate (2018-2019), then as Chair (2019-2020) and currently as Immediate Past Chair (2020-). In 2020, he joined the IMA’s Council as a Co-opted Member (2020-2021), acting primarily as an ECM representative. Francisco started a three-year term as an Elected Member of the IMA Council during 2021.
Francisco is very enthusiastic about working at the interface between pure and applied disciplines. He is also particularly engaged with teaching and with promoting mathematical sciences to general audiences. Among the non-scientific projects he has taken part in, he spent a year and a half teaching underprivileged students in Brazil prior to their A-Level equivalent exams.
As an ECM voice at the IMA’s Council, he aims to strengthen the early career mathematicians’ influence within the Institute and beyond, and contribute to the many ongoing initiatives from the current and past councillors, particularly those regarding both diversity and inclusion.