By Bernard Deconinck
October 11, 2024
This might be a very different newsletter opener if I had written it at the end of last academic year, as opposed to the beginning of this one.
After a tumultuous Spring Quarter (Gaza protests, grad student union protests) I was ready for a quiet summer to recharge before my last year as chair. A quiet summer it was not! The turbulent summer started with a fire on July 3, in the office of one of our staff members, in the very early morning (before 7am). Thanks to our new fire alarm, the fire department was on site in minutes and the fire did not spread beyond that one office. Nonetheless, the second fire in 18 months in Lewis Hall points to deeper issues with Lewis Hall’s old electrical network which was never designed for its current level of occupancy. Conversations with all involved parties are ongoing on how to proceed with this. Luckily, nobody was hurt!
Second, a few weeks later, on July 19, our Administrator Katherine McDermott gave notice she was leaving to become the administrator for Communications, where she had been helping out for a while. Katherine’s never been one to sit still for a while, and she figured Communications present a new set of challenges for her. That left us without an administrator since then. Katherine’s been keeping us afloat, just like she was helping Communications before switching to them, but we are all (that includes Katherine) eager to get on with the job search to find her permanent replacement. Much better news is that we found out that we will be searching to fill 3 faculty positions: two tenure-track ones, and one teaching track. All the requirements that come with this process took up a lot of my summer, especially without an administrator to deal with a lot of it. As I said, these additions are good news: they will allow us to expand the undergraduate program, and bring more excellent people to the department.
Our academic programs continue to be in great demand, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. And we keep on producing top students who are going on to excel wherever they go, be it academia (including graduate programs elsewhere), government, industry and national labs. A celebration of our great students can be seen here. This year, we decided to build up the Pearson Fellows program: named after Carl Pearson, one of the founders of our department, Pearson Fellows are brought to the department for three years typically between receiving their PhD and moving on to tenure-track positions elsewhere. They have a small teaching load (no more than 3 quarter courses per year) and will contribute greatly to the vibrant research community in the department. This year, Natalie Frank and Fanze Kong (just graduated from NYU and UBC, respectively) are joining us as Pearson Fellows. You’ll probably hear from them in a future newsletter.
This has been a quiet year for additions to the department: the only notably addition among faculty and staff is Assistant Teaching Professor Jakob Kotas, who joins us after delaying his offer for one year, having accepted it in 2023. Jakob is a PhD graduate from our department, who is happy to join our ranks and help expand our undergraduate program.
Our department graduated 8 students with PhD degrees, 79 students with MS degrees in applied mathematics and 44 students with MS degrees in CFRM. Our undergraduate class was sizeable, now that the program is reaching maturity. We had 68 graduates with BS degrees either in Applied Mathematics or in CFRM. The quality of our undergraduate students continues to be outstanding, as we could all witness at our graduation event, and in the recognition they received. In addition, Jonathan Aalto was the second Amath student ever to be honored as one of the Husky 100, and Sayako Mitchell received the university-wide 2022-23 Presidential Junior Medal for High Scholarship award. At the faculty level, let me single out that Associate Professors Jingwei Hu and Tom Trogdon were promoted to full professor, and that Assistant Professor Bamdad Hosseini received an NSF CAREER award!
There are some fantastic contributions for you to read in this newsletter. Assistant Professor Heather Wilber talks about her first year in the department, while a major force behind the existence of these newsletters, Tony Garcia gives you his front-desk perspective here. Tony is the repeat winner of the “who has made a difference” poll! Pearson Fellow Konstantinos Mamis tells us what his experience in our department is like, through the lens of his homeland background. PhD alum Jacob Price shares what life is like in a small, teaching-oriented department at nearby University of Puget Sound, where he is now the senior faculty member.
The other contributions are from current students or recent alums, like Arvid Levander, the runner-up in last year’s Dessert Competition, not that he’s bitter about that! Payton Howell and Wietse Vaes recount, with great affection no doubt, their first-year experiences in the PhD program. Both Payton and Wietse feel very strongly about our Applied Math community and they are stepping up in their new roles as SIAM UW President and Graduate Student Representative, respectively. Finally, CFRM graduates Julia Jing Xu (MS ‘24) and Yihan Yin (Undergrad ‘24) discuss their experiences.
Each year, we try to get contributions from a broad representational cross section of groups that contribute to the UW Applied Math family, but we do not always succeed as the timing is not always right, or for other reasons. We are always interested in hearing from more of you, and if any of you wish to contribute to future newsletters, please let us know and we will keep this in mind!