Congratulations to Pearsons Fellow Fanze Kong for winning the Cecil Graham Doctoral Dissertation Prize.
From their website: The 2025 Cecil Graham Doctoral Dissertation Award is given to Dr. Fanze Kong in recognition for for their work on pattern formation in a variety of biologically relevant models. Specifically, Dr Kong used a combination of analytical tools to probe the conditions under which localized spikes may be observed as stable solutions of reaction-diffusion-advection partial differential equations. These equations arise in a variety of contexts, several of which were explored in the dissertation, including Allee effects in populations living in heterogeneous environments, chemotactic aggregation of cells, both in a static fluid and with flow of the ambient fluid, and mean-field games used to understand collective dynamics in market economics. The analysis of these equations is technically challenging and addresses issues of existence, stability and dynamics of spike solutions using theoretical tools including Lyapunov-Schmidt reductions, PDE estimates, spectral theory, asymptotic analysis, and nonlinear dynamics, supplemented by numerical simulations to illustrate the effects studied. Situations in which a single spike arises as well as those where multiple spikes coexist were considered. Dr Kong’s ability to identify and master the mathematics necessary to fully solve complex problems reflects technical expertise, and a remarkable ability to recognize underlying commonalities between equations arising in different contexts. These qualities position Dr. Kong as an emerging star in the field of applied mathematics with research that has immediate and far-reaching impacts both within applied mathematics and across various application domains, ranging from biology to financial systems.