Dear colleagues, friends, authors, and readers of the ECMI blog,
As we approach the end of the year, it is a good moment to reflect on the many activities and innovations that have taken place. Throughout the year, the ECMI Council, the Educational Committee, and the Research and Innovation Committee have met regularly in hybrid format.
During the Council meeting in May, the board had the opportunity to visit the facilities of Kaunas University of Technology, which will host our next international ECMI Conference. We were very positively impressed by what we saw. Preparations for ECMI2026 are already underway, and the Scientific Committee has defined an excellent list of keynote speakers who will cover a wide and exciting range of topics in industrial and applied mathematics. The calls for minisymposia and thematic sessions are now open, and we look forward to welcoming you all to Kaunas from June 29 to July 3, 2026, for what promises to be a stimulating conference.
For more information, please visit https://ecmi2026.org/ecmi2026.
In the field of education, our flagship event—the Mathematical Modelling Week—was held in Kaunas on June 29 – July 4, 2025 and proved to be a great success. The 2025 ECMI Student Competition was won by a team from Milan, with the prize awarded during the Modelling Week. The Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Programme MATHS-DISC has completed its first round of recruitment, and the inaugural activities are now underway.
Regarding our editorial initiatives, we are in the process of renewing and expanding the Editorial Board of the Journal of Mathematics in Industry in order to attract more high-quality submissions, not only from Europe but from around the world. We also strongly encourage the creation of Special Issues dedicated to emerging and topical areas of scientific research. ECMI continues to support authors affiliated with ECMI nodes by covering article processing charges (APCs). The 2024 Annual Report was distributed in the autumn and is now available on the ECMI blog.
ECMI remains actively engaged with other organizations such as the EMS (through the Committee for Applied and Interdisciplinary Activities), ICIAM, and EU-MATHS-IN, to further strengthen the European industrial mathematics community. Since 2024, ECMI has also joined the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE), collaborating to safeguard the independence of the forthcoming FP10 framework and to ensure that scientific research across all fields continues to receive appropriate funding.
This year, two new centers—Gdańsk University of Technology (Poland) and KU Leuven (Belgium)—joined ECMI. An inspiring workshop was organized in Gdańsk, attended by myself and our Managing Director, Cláudia Nunes, to explore future collaborations. We were also delighted to welcome Belgium among the countries represented on our Council. In addition, we have received expressions of interest in joining ECMI from universities in North Macedonia, Greece, and Georgia—countries not yet represented in ECMI—which will further extend our geographical reach across Europe.
The beginning of 2026 will also bring changes in several key ECMI roles: Neil Budko will become the new Treasurer, Thomas Goetz will serve as ECMI’s representative in EU-MATHS-IN, and Krzysztof Burnecki will take on the position of Vice-Chair of the Research and Innovation Committee. I want to thank Thomas Goetz, Aderito Araujo and Dietmar Hoemberg, who are leaving these three roles, for their dedication to ECMI in the past years.
As always, I encourage you to stay engaged with our blog, support ECMI initiatives, and share your ideas and proposals. We are particularly eager to welcome new members and new perspectives, as ECMI continues to promote cooperation and diversity throughout Europe. Together, we will keep advancing educational activities, collaborative projects with industry, and networking opportunities.
Wishing you a joyful holiday season and a happy, successful 2026!
Alessandra Micheletti
ECMI President