An Interview With Ortrud Oellermann

Abstract

Ortrud R. Oellermann received an M.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Natal, South Africa in 1983 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Western Michigan University, USA in 1986. She taught at several universities, but the majority of her academic career was spent at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, where she served from July 1996 until August 31, 2021, when she retired as a professor. She is currently an adjunct professor of mathematics at both the University of Winnipeg and the University of Victoria, Canada. Professor Oellermann was honoured with a Professor Emerita title from the University of Winnipeg in June 2022. Throughout her career she held research grant funding from research funding agencies such as the Office of Naval Research (USA), the National Research Foundation (South Africa) and NSERC (Canada). To date she has 85 co-authors of which 22 are former research students or post-doctoral fellows. She is currently one of four editors-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. Previously she served on the editorial boards of Ars Combinatoria and Utilitas Mathematics. Professor Oellermann has received several medals, including the Hall Medal from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications in 1995. She was an elected member of the board of directors of the Canadian Mathematical Society (July 2001 June 2005) and the executive committee of the Discrete Mathematics activity group of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (January 2006 December 2007). Professor Oellermann also served as an academic consultant for the Cambridge University Press monograph “Topics in Structural Graph Theory” edited by Lowell W. Beineke and Robin J. Wilson.