The IMA Board of Governors is a key governing body of the IMA. It is charged with giving overall scientific guidance to the IMA, providing input and oversight for all its programs. The Board. consists of twelve distinguished scientists from diverse backgrounds.

Among the Board's most important roles is the development and approval of the IMA annual thematic program. The annual program is the IMA's largest activity, accounting for more than half of the IMA's resources and involving on the order of 1,000 participants. At its October meeting, the Board approved a proposal for a 2005-6 Annual program in Imaging. The program organizers will be Margaret Cheney, Donald Geman, Alberto Grunbaum, Dennis Healy, Jan Koenderink, Frank Natterer, and George Papanicolaou. The program will be organized in three quarters along a natural division of imaging science--Image Formation, Image Processing, and Image Interpretation--but includes mechanisms to encourage an interplay among these parts. Imaging is fast-growing field with applications ranging from nanoscience to astrophysics, from medicine to homeland security. Sophisticated mathematics has been developed and applied to imaging for many years, and major mathematical developed will clearly be required as the subject advances driven by new applications and new technologies.

Each summer the IMA runs a summer program in an important and topical area. At the October meeting the Board approved a proposal by John Baez and Peter May for the 2004 summer program in "n-Categories: Foundations and Applications". This area of mathematics is very new and of great current interest. It concerns iterative structures that appear naturally in a wide variety of contexts and has connections to a variety of areas of mathematics, computer science, and physics.

The twelve Board members serve three year terms. At the October meeting the Board chose four distinguished scientists to replace four outgoing members. The new Board members, whose terms begin January 1, are Eitan Tadmor, Philippe Tondeur, Ruth Williams, and Michalis Yannikakis. Tadmor, a numerical analyst, is presently professor of mathematics and director of Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling at the University of Maryland. Former NSF Division of Mathematical Science Director Philippe Tondeur, whose research interests are in differential geometry, is now back at the University of Illinois where he is Emeritus Professor. Ruth Williams, a probabilist, is professor of mathematics at the University of California San Diego. We are delighted to welcome her back to the IMA: she began her career as an IMA postdoc. Yannikakis, who recently left a successful career at Bell Labs to become professor at Stanford University, is an expert in theoretical computer science.

Continuing Board are Marsha Berger (NYU), Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT), Richard James (Minnesota), Jon Kettenring (Telcordia), Thomas Kurtz (Wisconsin), James Sethian (UC Berkeley), De Witt Sumners (Florida State), and William Symes (Rice). Retiring from the Board are Joanne Feigenbaum, William Gear, Fan Chung Graham, and James Yorke. The IMA expresses its heartfelt thanks for their service.