We welcomed three assistant professors, two professors, a visiting professor and a lecturer.

Shiferaw Berhanu

Shiferaw joined our department as a Visiting Professor. He moved to Maryland from Temple University. His research interests are in micro local analysis, several complex variables, and PDEs. He received a B.Sc. from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and a Ph.D. from Rutgers. Shiferaw is a Fellow of the AMS, an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.

Tristan Buckmaster

Tristan joined our department as a Full Professor. He received a B.Sc. in Monash University, an M.Sc. in the University of Bonn, and a Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig/Max Planck Institute. After graduating, Tristan was a Courant Instructor at NYU before moving to Princeton as an Assistant Professor. Tristan’s area of research is the mathematical analysis of partial differential equations. Most of his results are related to the equations of fluid mechanics. His best-known work is the proof that weak solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics are not unique in general. Tristan has many other substantial results on the Euler equations and on weak turbulence for the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. He has received many awards for his work, including the Clay Research Award in 2019.

Jamie Conway

Jamie joined our department as a Lecturer. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech (with John Etnyre). He was then a postdoc at UC Berkeley before moving to the D.C. area during the pandemic. Jamie’s research interests are contact and symplectic geometry. He also typesets books specializing in Hebrew/Yiddish.

Abba Gumel

Abba Gumel joined our department as the Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed Chair in Mathematics. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of Biology and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology. Abba moved to Maryland from Arizona State University where he held the title of Foundation Professor. Abba is a distinguished mathematician working in the area of disease modeling. He is recognized as a major international figure in mathematical epidemiology. Abba is a highly cited prolific researcher that received many honors and awards throughout his career. He was the 2021 American Mathematical Society Einstein Public Lecturer, a recipient of the Bellman Prize, a Fellow of the African Scientific Institute, a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Science, and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. This year he was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Deep Ray

Deep Ray will join our department in spring 2023 as an Assistant Professor and hold a joint appointment with the Insitute for Physical Science and Technology. Deep received his Ph.D. from the Tata Institute in Bangalore, India. His advisors were Praveen Chandrashekar (Tata Institute) and Sid Mishra (ETH Zurich). After graduation, Deep was a postdoc in EPFL, Switzerland, Rice University, and more recently at USC. Deep works in numerical analysis, scientific computing, machine learning, and data science. He obtained significant results in his work on high-order schemes for flow problems and deep learning-based shock capturing techniques. His ongoing work is on Bayesian inference using deep learning priors.

Haizhao Yang

Haizhao joined our department as an Assistant Professor. He received his M.S. from the University of Texas at Austin and Ph.D. from Stanford (a student of Lexing Ying). He was a postdoc at Duke (working with Daubechies), an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, and an Assistant Professor at Purdue. Haizhao received an NSF CAREER Award and an ONR Young Investigator award. He is working on many aspects of data science, including deep learning and reinforced learning, to which he made significant contributions.

Boyu Zhang

Boyu joined our department as an Assistant Professor. He received his B.S. from Peking University, his Ph.D. from Harvard University (with Clifford Taubes). He was a postdoc at Princeton before being hired by Princeton as an Assistant Professor.  Boyu’s research covers categorification, gauge theory, geometric analysis, foliation theory, and low-dimensional topology.  He has made significant contributions throughout low-dimensional topology, gauge theory, and symplectic geometry. 

The new Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed Chair in Mathematics conducts research at the crossroads of math, biology and anthropogenic climate change

Abba Gumel was just a toddler when he saw his first math equation. His uncle, a teacher in Nigeria, used to hoist Gumel on his shoulders and carry him into his first class of the day, which happened to be arithmetic.

As Gumel sat in the back of the classroom behind the older students, the odd squiggles on the blackboard captured and captivated his imagination.

“I grew up seeing numbers,” Gumel said. “I didn’t know anything else that I could do.”
Gumel has been an avid math fan ever since. He met one of his role models, the late Stephen Hawking, twice, and his eyes light up while discussing Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis papers—particularly the one that debuted the physicist’s famous E=mc2 equation. Gumel said he loves math for its elegance, precision and capacity to explain the complexities of nature, but also for its power to shape history and save lives.

Above all else, he enjoys inspiring the next generation of change-makers. Following his faculty positions at the University of Manitoba in Canada (1999-2014) and Arizona State University (2014-22), Gumel joined the University of Maryland in fall 2022 as the Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed Chair in Mathematics. He also holds joint appointments in the Department of Biology and Institute for Physical Science and Technology and extolls the value of working with experts of all stripes, from epidemiologists to ecologists to sociologists.

Gumel’s work primarily involves designing, analyzing and simulating mathematical models to gain insight and understanding of the transmission dynamics and control of emerging, re-emerging and resurging infectious diseases. Some of his past research demonstrated the dynamics of dengue disease-carrying mosquitoes, the impact of quarantine on an Ebola outbreak and the ability of face masks to slow the spread of COVID-19. His first paper on the COVID-19 pandemic, published in 2020, received over 1,200 citations and the prize for best paper published in the journal that year.
 

Over the course of his career, Gumel has written nearly 170 peer-reviewed research papers and received an array of awards and honors. He and his then-graduate student at Arizona State University, Kamaldeen Okuneye, received the Bellman Prize last year at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology for their paper on the links between malaria transmission and climate. This year, Gumel was named Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics as well as the American Mathematical Society.

UMD Mathematics Chair Doron Levy said Gumel’s cross-cutting research fits into the university’s strategic plan of working together to address societal and global problems. 

“It was a remarkable achievement to attract to Maryland a mathematician who is one of the world’s leading experts on mathematical epidemiology and mathematical biology,” Levy said. “Dr. Gumel’s research touches on many aspects of the university’s grand challenges agenda, including pandemic preparedness and climate change. We are very fortunate to have him as a colleague.”

Gumel has built his mathematical career by providing solutions and formulating strategies for effectively controlling or mitigating infectious diseases, but that wasn’t always the end goal. Although he received a “classical training” in mathematics from Bayero University in Nigeria, he did not learn about math’s practical applications until he started a Ph.D. program at Brunel University in the United Kingdom. At the time, his advisor used mathematical equations to study the absorption rate and optimal dosage of topical drugs.

“I never knew mathematics could be useful in answering any real-world questions. I just knew how to prove theorems,” Gumel said. “I was fascinated that mathematics could be used in medicine, and later I learned about other applications, such as in cosmology, natural and engineering sciences, economics and even social sciences. To use it to answer questions and solve some of the most important grand challenges facing mankind—it’s just amazing. I’ve been hooked ever since.”

In the coming years, one of Gumel’s top research goals is working toward the global ZERO by 40 initiative, which aims to eradicate malaria by 2040. Although malaria-carrying mosquitoes are moving into new geographic areas—in large part due to climate change—Gumel believes eradication is a realistic goal.

“I think that a genomic epidemiology framework, and mathematical modeling based on that, can provide the insight and tools that are needed to eradicate malaria,” he said. “We have a responsibility to wipe it out, and I think there’s a huge concerted effort now to achieve this objective.”

Gumel said a better understanding of genomics and epidemiology could lead to a vaccine that stops the spread of malaria among humans. He is also studying the links between malaria transmission and mosquito insecticide resistance, a significant barrier to eradication. He stressed that “the era of mathematicians working in silos is long gone,” and that these challenges require collaboration across fields.

“To solve some of the world’s most important grand challenges, researchers must work across disciplines,” he said. “We have to adopt a multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary approach to science.”

While discussing his work, Gumel frequently redirects the conversation to the students who play a central role in his research. He believes the most rewarding part of his job at UMD is helping his students appreciate the beauty of numbers—just as his uncle did for him—and their power to change the world. He instills in his students an appreciation for the elegance, precision, rigor and widescale applicability of mathematics and its centrality to explaining our observable universe and solving our grand challenges.

“What I tell students is that through your work, you are potentially saving somebody’s life. I think that is extremely gratifying to be able to say that to a student,” Gumel reflected. “You are potentially saving somebody’s life through those equations you’re writing, through those simulations you’re running—and you can potentially save not just one life, but perhaps millions.”

$2.7M in new grants will support experiential learning.

Thousands of University of Maryland students will have new and enhanced learning experiences this year, thanks to a program designed to spur creativity in classroom instruction.

Nearly 300 courses across 86 academic programs have received support for the 2022-23 academic year from the new $2.7 million Teaching and Learning Innovation Grant initiative, an outgrowth of the university’s strategic plan. It calls for reimagining learning, and the initiative will encourage that in “inclusive, experiential, publicly engaged, creative, integrative, holistic and empowering” ways, according to Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice.

The grants are designed to “increase opportunities for students to do experiential learning—internships, field trips, a more high-engaged classroom environment,” said Marcio A. Oliveira, assistant vice president for academic innovation and technology and executive director of UMD’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center.

Four of the grants were awarded for mathematics and statistics courses: 

• Lecturers Jonathan Francis Fernandes and Mestiyage Gunatilleka received a grant for “Bringing Computing, Simulations, and Data Analysis to STAT 400”
• Professor Yanir Rubinstein received a grant for “Experiential Learning: Mathematics of Geometry and Data” (MATH 386)
• Senior Lecturer Hatice Sahinoglu received a grant for “A friendly introduction to Data Science with R”
• Assistant Professor Rodrigo Trevino received a grant for “Experimental Mathematics”