Autumn 2016 Newsletter

It’s been a few years since our last departmental newsletter. The biggest change since the last letter is that we’ve gone all electronic. I guess that’s not true: the biggest change for me is that I wasn’t the chair yet. But that change happened 18 months ago, and this newsletter focuses on the latest and greatest. It has been yet another exciting year for the department, as they all tend to be. We welcomed two new tenure-track faculty to the department, while two rode off… Read more
Travis Askham is a Research Associate of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington. As part of the Kutz research group, he works on numerical methods for data analysis and dynamical systems. As a continuation of his dissertation research, he also works on fast methods for partial differential equations. Travis received his Ph.D. (2016) in Mathematics from the Courant Institute at New York University, under the supervision of Leslie Greengard. Before that, he received his M.A. (… Read more
Read more
By now, most people living in the Pacific Northwest are aware of the danger posed by the Cascadia Subduction Zone that runs for more than 1000 km from Northern California to British Columbia. Every 500 years or so (on average, but with a large standard deviation!), it lets rip a Magnitude 9 earthquake comparable to the recent ones off the coast of Japan in 2011, or Sumatra in 2004, and also generates a comparable tsunami. A recent … Read more
By Eli Shlizerman Hi! My name is Eli (pronounced as “Ellie”) Shlizerman. I am excited to assume the appointment as a joint tenure-track Assistant Professor at AMATH and EE departments at UW. I received my MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. My training is in dynamical systems, model reduction and complex dynamics. After fascinating postdoctoral research at UW AMATH and Princeton University I joined UW AMATH… Read more
By Aleksandr (Sasha) Aravkin Exactly a year ago, in August 2015, I joined the Applied Math department at the University of Washington as an Assistant Professor. My relationship with the UW began much earlier in 2000, first as an undergraduate, and then as a graduate student. My doctoral work, supervised by Jim Burke, developed robust formulations and optimization algorithms for dynamic inference. Concurrently, I obtained an M.S. in Statistics, and statistical modeling has since… Read more
By Kathleen Champion SIAM UW is the University of Washington’s student chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The student-run organization provides a number of resources for students in the department, from informational tutorials and panels to opportunities for outreach and presentations. One of the main functions of SIAM UW is to provide resources for students that they may not get from elsewhere. Many of our weekly chapter meetings are geared towards helping… Read more
I would be lying if I told you the reason I came to the University of Washington was anything other than the incredible mountains just outside the city. But besides these geographic charms, it was clear that the UW was also an excellent engineering school set in a diverse, cool city. In the end my choice was a no-brainer. I arrived in Applied Mathematics without any clear research plan. My master’s research in Vermont had been in computational social science and networks, which isn’t part of… Read more
By Susie Sargsyan   I loved puzzles and math problems since I was a kid, and that love continued to grow. Even though my parents were against it, I decided to choose math as my career path and got accepted into the department of Mathematics at Yerevan State University. Since Armenia still carried remnants of Soviet methodology, we concentrated on the theory and not applications. After I graduated with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, I decided to continue my studies… Read more
Doctors of Philosophy Mauricio Del Razo Sarmina Advisors: Randy LeVeque, Hong Qian Stochastic Modeling of Reversible Biochemical Reaction-Diffusion Systems and High-Resolution Shock-Capturing Methods for Fluid Interfaces Jakob Kotas Advisor: Archis Ghate Dynamic, convex, and robust optimization with Bayesian learning for response-guided dosing Bethany Lusch Advisor: Nathan Kutz Machine learning and data decompositions for complex networked dynamical systems… Read more
Read more
SIAM UW AwardRecipient: Jake PriceFor exceptional service to the University of Washington Chapter of SIAM for the 2015-2016 academic year. Joseph Hammack Endowment AwardRecipients: Rohit Arora, Ryan HermleFor outstanding work by a student in the Department of Applied Mathematics. Boeing Teaching AwardRecipient: Christopher SwierczewskiFor outstanding teaching by a student in the Department of Applied Mathematics. Boeing Research Award Read more
  Click here to view the photos in Flickr.
Share