Dmitry Dolgopyat, Richard Greene and Zhanqing Li have been named Distinguished University Professors—the highest academic honor bestowed by the University of Maryland. They will be honored at the university’s annual Faculty and Staff Convocation on September 14, 2022.

“These faculty members are exceptionally deserving of being named Distinguished University Professors,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of UMD’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS). “I was proud to nominate them for consideration, and I celebrate and honor their inspirational commitment to CMNS and our students through their teaching, research and service.”

Dolgopyat, Greene and Li join more than 50 colleagues in CMNS who have been named Distinguished University Professors since 1980. Distinguished University Professors are faculty members who have been recognized nationally and internationally for the importance of their scholarly achievements. UMD’s president, along with a committee composed of the provost and seven faculty members—including several Distinguished University Professors—from diverse disciplines select the honorees each year.

Dmitry Dolgopyat

Dmitry Dolgopyat. Photo courtesy of same. Click image to download hi-res version.

Dolgopyat is a world-renowned leader in the Department of Mathematics whose work focuses on dynamical systems, a field that studies the time evolution of natural and abstract systems.

Since joining UMD in 2002 as an associate professor, he gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians, was awarded the Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems, received the Annales Henri Poincaré Prize, was invited to give a plenary talk at the International Congress on Mathematical Physics and was elected as a foreign member of Academia Europaea.

Over his career, he has published 78 papers and mentored more than a dozen students and postdocs. He has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern Dynamics, Nonlinearity, Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems, Annales Henri Poincaré, and the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

He received his diploma in mathematics from Moscow State University in Russia in 1994 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1997.

Richard Greene

Richard Greene. Credit: Faye Levine. Click image to download hi-res version.

Greene joined UMD as a professor in 1989 to lead the Center for Superconductivity Research (now called the Quantum Materials Center) in the Department of Physics as its founding director.

He is a pioneer in the study of superconductivity and the synthesis and study of advanced quantum materials. He discovered the first superconducting polymer, discovered several new quantum phenomena in complex materials and detected magnetic spin waves optically for the first time. Greene’s work has had a large impact on the fields of both materials science and physics.

He has published 435 articles that have been cited more than 33,000 times, mentored more than 20 students and postdocs, and received continuous funding from the National Science Foundation since 1993. Before joining UMD, Greene was a researcher at IBM.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The APS named its dissertation award for experimental condensed matter physics in his honor.

Greene earned his B.S. in physics from MIT in 1960 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967.

Zhanqing Li

Zhanqing Li. Photo courtesy of same. Click image to download hi-res version.

Li, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, has made major contributions in atmospheric and environmental sciences that have improved our understanding of the Earth’s climate and air quality through remote sensing, experiments and modeling.

Li is a world leader in atmospheric physics, aerosols, clouds, radiation and their impact on climate change and air pollution. One of his discoveries was that aerosols—tiny airborne particles—in air and in clouds played a major role in trapping and reflecting heat and in modulating cloud and precipitation. His work redefined how scientists view the roles of clouds in Earth’s climate, and his models have been used by NASA and others for calculating the global energy budget and monitoring wildfires and air quality.

He is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Chinese-American Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Li also received a Humboldt Research Award and the AGU’s Yoram J. Kaufman Outstanding Research and Unselfish Cooperation Award, among other honors. 

During his 20 years at UMD, he has mentored 23 Ph.D. students and 20 postdocs, been awarded $16 million in research grants, and published more than 380 peer-reviewed journal articles that have been cited more than 25,000 times. He was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science in 2020 and 2021 and one of the top 100 environmental scientists in the world by research.com. Many of his papers were influential in the IPCC assessment report and he is a contributor to the 2021 report for addressing climate change. He has served as editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and Advances in Meteorology.

He received his B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Meteorology at China’s Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in 1983 and 1986, respectively. After graduating with his Ph.D. in 1991 from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University, he worked as a Canadian government researcher until 2001 when he joined UMD as a professor.

This article was copied with premission from https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/4968

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.”