Jorge Balbás has started a two-year term as IPAM Associate Director. Balbás is well-known to IPAM: first as a UCLA graduate student and then as a professor of mathematics at California State University Northridge, he attended many IPAM workshops. He was a core participant of Optimal Transport (2008), Climate Modeling (2010), Plasma Physics (2012), and a RIPS academic mentor twice. He received his B.S., M.A. and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from UCLA. His research is in Scientific Computing and Numerical Analysis. In particular, he is interested in the design and implementation of efficient numerical algorithms for solving hyperbolic conservation laws and related time dependent problems. We are pleased that Jorge has joined our scientific staff.