By Bernard DeconinckSeptember 30, 2023
Eight years and counting. Has there been a “normal” year in my time as chair? We’ve had a pandemic, an earthquake retrofit (including moving everyone out), a 50th anniversary for the department, and many more events and incidents, some good, some bad. This past year served up a fire in Lewis Hall! It is probably not an exaggeration to say that if (now full) Professor Matt Lorig had not had early-morning online office hours from Lewis… Read more
By Ziyan Zhou
As a rising senior pursuing a double degree in Applied Mathematics and Art, my journey at UW has been an enriching and transformative experience. From the moment I entered college, I knew that I wanted to major in something math-related, driven by my passion for numbers and functions since high school. Throughout my freshman year which was fully online, I explored various classes across math, applied math, statistics, and computer science. While I found aspects I liked… Read more
By Zachary G. Nicolaou
Welcome to another academic year, AMATH! It’s summer as I’m writing, and Lewis has been quiet these days, hopefully implying that everyone is enjoying the weather. I’ve been holding down the fort on the first floor and admiring Facilities' progress; we will be prepared for a fire when everyone returns. Congrats to the students and faculty for raising appropriate concerns about building safety and the leadership for taking concrete measures! The isolation has… Read more
By Kelsey Marcinko
It’s wild to me that I’ve been carrying the title of “Dr. Marcinko” for 3 years, and I am at the beginning of my fourth(!) year as a professor at Whitworth University, my alma mater. (Whitworth is a Christian liberal-arts university on the drier side of Washington state). Enough time has somehow passed so that most of the current Ph.D. students in the Applied Math department are students I never knew. As I reflect back on my time in the department, I remain grateful… Read more
By Natalie Sheils
In graduate school, the focus was going deep. I was cultivating myself to become the world authority in one specific area. While I was encouraged to read from various areas and take classes from other departments, I also had to write a thesis which meant learning about (in my case) the Fokas transform method for linear PDEs in incredible depth. What remained unbeknown to me during those times was how this seemingly niche training, and the relationships sprouting from… Read more
By Meghana Velegar
It has been a little over two months, and I still can’t believe that my long and arduous journey towards my degree has finally culminated. Sitting in the departmental ceremony in one of the designated PhD graduate chairs felt so surreal, and yet so absolutely real. To say that my journey in Applied Math was eventful would be an understatement. I have navigated severe mental health challenges, personal loss and grief, a high risk pregnancy, new motherhood, postpartum… Read more
By Kyle Sledge
It was fall 2017; the leaves were changing colors, and I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling of unfinished business. A few months prior, I successfully passed the third and final exam of the Chartered Financial Analyst professional designation, after multiple years of intense self-study. Earning the right to use the CFA credential was a significant career milestone that paired well with my on-the-job training as a bank examiner with a regulatory agency. With this… Read more
By Eli Shlizerman
Dynamical Systems theory is a powerful mathematical area which has been the bread-and-butter to many in the Applied Mathematics community. At UW AMATH, multiple courses, with dynamical systems as core methodology, are being taught from undergraduate to advanced graduate curriculum, and a variety of research directions both in foundations and applications of dynamical systems are conducted. No wonder that the word “dynamical” is a synonym of the word “… Read more
By Robert Hollman
When I arrived at the University of Washington in August of 2022, I felt that the skills I was bringing into the program fell woefully short of the skills required to succeed. My undergraduate experience had left me disillusioned about my place in academia – while my love of math felt simple, college required navigating a plethora of new experiences with little social support to guide my path. I chose my undergraduate major by accident and dropped out of my education… Read more
By Killian Doran
The leaves are changing, the weather is cooling, and football is back. Summer is coming to a close and fall is charging ahead at full speed. As I sit here, I reflect on a summer of change. If you had asked me at the beginning of 2023 If I saw myself moving to Seattle and working at the University of Washington, I would have given you an outstanding no. It is bizarre to think about how much actually changes over the course of the year.
I started as the Graduate… Read more
Doctors of Philosophy
Olga Dorabiala - Advisors: J. Nathan Kutz, Aleksandr Aravkin
Robust Approaches for Unsupervised Learning
Nora Gilbertson - Advisor: Mark Kot
Dynamics in Discrete Time: Successional Communities, Spatial Models, and Allee Effects
Nathan Lee - Advisor: Ivana BozicInvestigating longitudinal evolution of liquid cancers using computational and mathematical models
Aleksei Sholokhov - Advisors: Aleksandr Aravkin, J. Nathan Kutz
Optimization… Read more
Congratulations to our 2023 Department Award Winners!
SIAM UW AwardRecipient: Eleanor Byrnes
Boeing Excellence AwardRecipients: John Coughlin, Alexander Hsu, Erin Stafford, Matthew Helton, Hannah Lee
Boeing Excellence in Research and Service AwardRecipient: Aleksei Sholokhov
Boeing Excellence in Research and Teaching AwardRecipient: Amin Rahman
Boeing Outstanding Performance AwardRecipient: Jenna Bendinelli
Boeing Research AwardRecipient… Read more