External Advisory Board

Bill Anderson graduated from UNL in 1990 with a BS in Education – Speech Communication and Political Science.  After teaching high school communications for a few years, he pivoted into technology where he spent 30 years until retiring in 2025.  His career spanned 24 years at Microsoft, and some additional time at United Health Group (Optum Labs) and Ford Motor Corporation.  For the last 10 years Anderson has worked in the fields of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, and data science.  He has designed/developed/delivered large-scale software projects leveraging AI/ML, worked with and managed data science teams across Microsoft, as well as assisted the UHG Machine Learning Review Board to provide guardrails for responsible AI across all of UHG.

Amy Bouska earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics from UNL in 1969. Subsequently she earned master’s degrees from Duke in mathematics and Virginia Tech in statistics.  Bouska left academia to become a casualty actuary, and received her FCAS (Fellowship in the Casualty Actuarial Society) in 1984. During her career, Bouska served on the Board of Directors and Vice President International for the Casualty Actuarial Society, receiving the CAS’ Matthew Rodermund Memorial Service Award in addition to the Woodward-Fondiller Prize for best original paper. She worked at Aetna Life & Casualty and Nationwide Insurance before joining the consulting firm Tillinghast – Towers Perrin (now Willis Towers Watson) in 1987.  She pioneered the development and application of large-scale simulation models for casualty insurance losses from mass torts, such as leaking underground storage tanks (LUST), pollution, asbestos, lead paint, etc., and worked on the reform of Lloyd’s of London.  After retiring in 2006 as a managing principal, Bouska spent sixteen years on the City Council in Cresco, Iowa, retiring from that role at the end of 2025. She is currently the immediate Past President (and founding member) of the Clean Energy Districts of Iowa.

Gopi Shah Goda is the Director of the Retirement Security Project, the inaugural Alice M. Rivlin Chair in Economic Policy, and Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.  Dr. Goda conducts research that informs how policy can best serve aging societies, including how individuals make healthcare, saving and retirement decisions as they age and the sustainability of public programs serving older populations. 

Dr. Goda served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from July 2021 to July 2022, and was on California Governor Gavin Newsom's Council of Economic Advisors from January to August 2024.  She was a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and attained Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries.  Prior to joining Brookings, Dr. Goda was a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), serving as Deputy Director, and Professor of Economics and Health Policy (by courtesy) at Stanford University.  Dr. Goda earned her BS in mathematics and actuarial science from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, obtained a PhD in economics from Stanford University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University.

Graham J. Leuschke is Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Department at Syracuse University, where he has been a faculty member since 2004 and has served as department chair since 2020. His research lies at the intersection of commutative algebra, representation theory, and non-commutative algebraic geometry, with particular focus on maximal Cohen-Macaulay modules over Cohen-Macaulay rings.

Leuschke earned his BA from Reed College in 1995 and his PhD from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2000. He subsequently held an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Kansas and a postdoctoral position at the University of Toronto before joining Syracuse. His research has been supported by funding from the NSF and NSA.

He is the author or co-author of more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and two books, Twenty-Four Hours of Local Cohomology and Cohen-Macaulay. He has served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Commutative Algebra and Communications in Algebra, chaired the AMS Committee on Meetings and Conferences (2014–2016), and has extensive experience organizing regional and international conferences. He is also co-founder of commalg.org, a long-running community resource for commutative algebraists worldwide.

A dedicated mentor, Leuschke received Syracuse University's Excellence in Graduate Education Faculty Recognition Award in 2018 and has supervised three postdoctoral scholars and seven doctoral students.

W. J. “Jim” Lewis is Aaron Douglas Professor Emeritus at UNL where he served as chair of the Department of Mathematics, Director of the Center for Science, Mathematics and Computer Education and Director of STEM Education Research Initiatives. From 2015 to 2018 he worked at the National Science Foundation, serving first as Deputy Assistant Director and then as Acting Assistant Director for NSF’s Education and Human Resources Directorate. Lewis is an elected fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2015, he received the MAA’s Gung and Hu Award for Distinguished Service and the AMS’s Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics. Lewis has received the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award and the Carnegie Foundation’s Nebraska Professor of the Year Award. Lewis earned his BS and PhD in mathematics at Louisiana State University.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Ph.D. is the Rice University Malcolm Gillis University Professor of Bioengineering and co-Director of Rice 360 Institute for Global Health. Her research has been instrumental in advancing early cancer detection and in developing and scaling affordable technologies to improve newborn and maternal health, especially in low-resource settings. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She received her PhD in Medical Physics from MIT and her BS in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Nebraska.

Lucas Sabalka grew up in Lincoln and attended UNL as an undergraduate, earning his BS degree in 2002 with a triple major in mathematics, computer science, and history. Four years later, in 2006 he earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for my PhD in mathematics. Dr. Sabalka had post-docs at the University of California, Davis and Binghamton University, SUNY, before accepting a tenure-track position at Saint Louis University. Dr. Sabalka moved to industry in 2013, becoming the Chief Data and Analytics Officer of Ocuvera, an artificial intelligence medical technology company. Ocuvera is an industry leader with respect to fall prevention in hospitals. Because Ocuvera is headquartered in Lincoln, several UNL graduate students have had the opportunity to have a summer internship gaining valuable experience as to how mathematics is used in industry.