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Peter Blossey Department: Applied Mathematics Area of Research: Turbulent Flows http://www.amath.washington.edu/~bloss/ bloss@amath.washington.edu I am a VIGRE Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington. I received a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 1999 from Cornell University, both in mechanical engineering. Before coming to the University of Washington in the fall of 2000, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell and at the University of California, San Diego. My research focuses on the application of the tools of theoretical and computational fluid dynamics to problems with practical industrial and environmental relevance. I have studied problems involving active and passive control of near-wall turbulent flow, the optimization of mixing in a jet in crossflow, polymer drag reduction and the contribution of energetic structures in compressible turbulent jets to far field noise. My approach to research relies on a number of tools---namely simulation, reduced-order modeling, proper orthogonal decomposition and linear stability analysis---in the study of the physics of turbulent flows. A recurring topic in my research to date has been the dynamics and control of large-scale, energetic structures in turbulent shear flows. |
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David B. Walton Department: Applied Mathematics Area of Research: Mathematical Biology http://www.amath.washington.edu/~walton/ walton@amath.washington.edu David Brian Walton--informally, he just goes by Brian--has long had a fascination with mathematics and its applications. He attended his freshman year of college at the California Institute of Technology, where he eventually selected mathematics over physics as his major. Taking two years off from school, he served for two years as a proselyting missionary. Following his mission, he transferred to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and earned a Bachelors degree in Mathematics in August, 1996, earning University Honors and Honors in Mathematics. His honors project considered a geometrical approach to finding the regular representation of the dihedral group. Immediately after completing his bachelors degree, David moved to Tucson, Arizona, to study at the University of Arizona in the Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Mathematics. The principle appeal for this program was a view that mathematics would be used to contribute to other disciplines. In 1998, he was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. David earned the Masters degree in May, 1998. He completed his Ph.D. in September, 2002, officially graduating in December. Although he studied a wide range of applied mathematics topics, the dominant thread of his studies was stochastic behavior and applied probability. One research project in which he participated was the study of a heavy quark equilibrating in a thermal quark-gluon plasma, a project in collaboration with Johann Rafelski, which resulted in a publication in Physical Review Letters. His dissertation, titled "Analysis of Single Molecule Kinesin Assay Data by Hidden Markov Model Filtering," under the guidance of his adviser Joseph Watkins, focused on finding mathematically-founded techniques for analyzing experimental data provided by Koen Visscher. My research interests include stochastic modeling issues in biology and physics. Active research projects include continued study of hidden Markov models to filter single-molecule experimental data as well as a problem studying a random evolution of a diffusion process driven by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. I would also like to extend my research program to include other aspects of mathematical biology. |
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Oliver Will Department: Statistics Area of Research: Statistical Biology, Geology, Molecular Evolution http://faculty.washington.edu/oliveran/ oliveran@stat.washington.edu Oliver Will is a Research Associate in the statistics department. He has a B.A. in Mathematics. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Southern California in the summer of 2001. His research involves statistical issues in primate phylogeny. Oliver actively collaborates with researchers at the UW Genome Center. |
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Isabella Novik Department: Mathematics Area of Research: Algebraic and geometric combinatorics http://www.math.washington.edu/~novik/ novik@math.washington.edu I am an Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Washington (UW). I recieved a B.S. (1994), M.Sc.(1996) and Ph.D (1999) from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, all three in Mathematics. Before coming to the University of Washington in the fall of 2001, I was a Morrey Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. My Research lies in algebraic and geometric combinatorics, especially combinatorics of polytopes and manifolds, and connections between combinatorics, commutative algebra, and algebraic topology. Among the problems I have worked on are the Upper Bound Conjecture for manifolds and certain pseudomanifolds, the Kuhnel and the Sparla conjectures on the Euler characteristic of triangulated manifolds and centrally symmetric manifolds, and some problems related to the cd-index. |