Amber L. Puha
Amber Lynn Puha is an American mathematician and educator at California State University San Marcos. Her research concerns probability theory and stochastic processes. Early life and education. She earned a B.A. in mathematics at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1993 and a Ph.D. in mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Thomas M. Liggett in 1998. Career. She joined California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) in 1999. She was appointed an associate professor in 2005 and a full professor in 2010. She has been the chair of the Department of  Mathematics at CSUSM since 2021. Her research has been focused on the modeling and analysis of stochastic networks. From 2009 to 2011, she served as an associate director at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, a federally funded mathematics research institute on the UCLA campus. From 2013 to 2015, she served a three-year elected term on the American Mathematical Society Council, the main governing body of the society. From 2016 to 2019, she served on the INFORMS Applied Probability Society Prize Committee. Since 2013, she has been the coordinator of The Southern California Probability Symposium, an annual gathering  of probabilists supported by University of California, Irvine, UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, and University of Southern California. In addition to her academic work, she served as the faculty advisor for the CSUSM Surf Team, which competes in the National Scholastic Surfing Association (NSSA). She led the team to its first National Championship in 2009 and again in 2019. She won the NSSA Coach of the Year award in 2019.