By Tom Trogdon,
I’m honored to step in as the ninth Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington. With this honor comes a very challenging time. Because of budgetary pressures at all levels, in cooperation with many departments on campus, we are being forced to rethink the future of higher education.
Here in Applied Math, we, as always, have a firm commitment for producing cutting-edge research and delivering high-caliber instruction on timely topics. We will have to work harder than ever to fulfill our mission, but within adversity there is opportunity.
In this newsletter, you’ll hear about the exciting events at the Computational Neuroscience Center and about conferences sponsored by the department. You’ll also hear alumni stories — one about AMATH PhD alum Donsub Rim returning to UW for his sabbatical, an industry perspective from another AMATH PhD alum Ben Lansdell, and a tale of travel and study from MS alum Johan Azambou. We will take a tour with current members of the department including Pearson Fellow Fanze Kong, now-second-year PhD student Emme McMullen and dual-degree AMATH-Creative Writing student Catherine Wickman-Hudnut.
But let me now give a very hearty, well-deserved thank you to Professor and Chair Emeritus Bernard Deconinck for going above and beyond in his 10+ years of service as Chair. We wish him all the best as he embarks on a year-long sabbatical that will no doubt rejuvenate him in a way I can only envy.
I want to congratulate Associate Professor Mark Kot and Professor Hong Qian on their retirements! We thank them each for over 25 years of service. While their presence in the department on a daily basis will be very much missed, we wish them well for their next chapters. We also congratulate Adrienne Fairhall, Professor of Neurobiology and Biophysics and Adjunct Professor of Applied Mathematics, on her election to the National Academy of Sciences!
With departures, comes new faculty and staff arrivals! I want to welcome Assistant Professor Krutika Tawri, our newest assistant professor, who joined us in July, hailing from UC Berkeley. Krutika works on deterministic and stochastic partial differential equations arising in a number of applied areas. I am also pleased to welcome (back) Assistant Teaching Professor Jeremy Upsal. Both the faculty and students will benefit from having such a skilled instructor on the faculty. And I want to welcome Christine Texeira to the department. Christine joins our staff as an academic advisor for our ACM and CFRM MS programs, with an impressive background in creative writing, advising and graphic design.
Our Pearson Fellows program is growing with the addition of Dr. Bhavna Kaushik and Dr. Jiwon Jung. Bhavna joins us from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi, specializing in mathematical methods and nonlinear waves while Jiwon joins us from Purdue University and her research focuses on data-driven methods in finance and insurance.
While the academic environment faces many challenges, the Department of Applied Mathematics is charging on. This year we graduated 5 students with PhD degrees, 81 students with MS degrees in Applied Mathematics and 56 students with MS degrees in CFRM. Our undergraduate program is thriving with 81 graduates with BS degrees in either Applied Mathematics or in CFRM.
As we move through this academic year, the importance of the partnership between students, faculty and staff is clearer to me, now more than ever. It goes without saying, but should still be said, we would fail without one another.