Texas Tech University

Faculty, Staff, and Student News

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2024

April

2024 Professing Excellence Award Winners
University Student Housing gives students the chance to select the Professing Excellence Award to those faculty members they feel have demonstrated exceptional educational skill. Of the twelve 2024 awards given, Math professors garnered 4. Congratulations to Jennifer Wang, Abu Yillah, Clayton Paget and Georgia Thompson!

February

RH
Full Professor and Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Success Raegan Higgins has been elected President of the AWM (Association for Women in Mathematics),  and began her 4-year term February 1st.  A prestigious national and international organization, this very good news reflects well on Texas Tech.

January

HT
Dr. Hung Tran has been named a Simons Laufer Mathematical Research Institute member for the program New Frontiers in Curvature: Flows, General Relativity, Minimal Submanifolds, and Symmetry from August 19th to December 20th.
JH
Assistant Professor Juntao Huang (PI), with Andrew Christlieb of Michigan State University (Co-PI), have successfully applied and are recommended for approval of a $322,100 Office of Naval Research award for the project Structure-preserving shallow water moment models for free surface flows.  To be divided between the schools with MSU getting $155,852 and Texas Tech the balance, $166,248, more details forthcoming as they emerge.
DV
Full Professor Dimitri Volchenkov (co-PI), and Graduate Student and Research Assistant Alan Bohnert of our Department, working in interdisciplinary fashion with the Texas Tech Computer Science and Industrial, Manufacturing, and System Engineering (IMSE) Departments, have received a contract concerning data fusion, data analytics, and artificial intelligence methodologies. From AVX Aircraft for the US Army, this will be an 18-month contract. 

2023

December

NSF STTR Grant Awardees
Professors Katharine Long (PI) and Jeffrey Belding have received NSF STTR Phase I approval.  Their project, An Innovative Approach to Core Body Temperature: Solution for Preventative Mass Screening, in collaboration with Blink Thermal, is funded by the USAF for $109,291, of which Texas Tech will receive $32,000.  Good news, indeed.

October

Simons 2023 Awardees
Professors Sophia Jang, Yifan Wang, and Hongwei Mei each earned a 2023 Simons Travel Grant.  Congratulations are in order.
NSF STEM Grant Awardees
Research Assistant Ryan Culbertson (PI) and Professor Brock Williams (Co-PI) have been awarded an NSF Grant worth $100,000.  The grant may be used to facilitate Prefreshman Engineering Programs, like TexPREP.  Very good news for the outreach mission of the Department.

September

JH
Congratulations on the promotion to Full Professor for Dr. Higgins, Howle, and Long, as well as tenure for Professors Guo, Tran, and Zhang. Also a promotion for Professor L. Volchenkov.  Great job!
The Texas Tech Mathematics and Statistics Department has been rated 69th by College Factual for the best Ph.D. programs in the country.

August

JH
The NSF Computational Mathematics Team has awarded a grant worth $249,394 to Professor Juntao Huang.  His grant, DMS-2309655, Structure-preserving machine learning moment closures for kinetic equations, runs through July 2026.

May

YW
Professor Yifan Wang has been awarded an NSF grant worth $82,347.00, Mechanistic modeling of cell encapsulation.  He is the Principal Investigator of this Mathematical Biology grant, which runs through April 2026.

April

EA
Dr. Eugenio Aulisa has been named the 2023 Arts and Sciences Outstanding Researcher by the Office of Research & Innovation, the ceremony held April 20th.  Dr. Aulisa has earned this distinction for his numerous grants and publications in Applied Mathematics.

March

ZR
According to Research.com's 2nd Edition, Dr. Zari Rachev has been listed as the 386th best research Mathematician in the world, and 212th at the national level.  This is a remarkable recognition, and we are honored he calls Texas Tech his academic home.

2022

October

RH
Dr. Raegan Higgins was notified she would be inducted into the 2023 Class of AWM Fellows in January 2023.  She earns this distinction for her sustained contributions to the mathematics profession through leadership roles in research, mentoring, directing the EDGE Program, and co-founding Mathematically Gifted and Black; and for her service to professional organizations, always with a focused purpose to uplift and inspire women, girls, and those from historically under-represented groups.

September

KY
Dr. Kazuo Yamazaki has been awarded a Simons Mathematics and Physical Sciences Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians of $42,000 over five years for the proposal Fluid mechanics and related equations: deterministic and stochastic approaches
 
LWC
Dr. Lars Christensen has also been awarded a 2022 Simons Mathematics and Physical Sciences Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians of $42,000 over five years for the project Homological and homotopical algebra of commutative rings
 

July

RH
July was a BIG month for the Department's Dr. Raegan Higgins.  Having already been named the Co-Director of the EDGE 2022 Co-Director and while serving in this position during the program in Oxford, England, she was named an Assistant Vice-Provost for Faculty Success, developing initiatives, programs, and opportunities specific to inclusion and equity, mentorship, professional development, and help implement reviews of, and changes to, current policies and procedures that faculty have identified as barriers to advancement.

June

May

MT
Department Chair Dr. Magda Toda was selected among the Division of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion's Phenomenal Women Honorees for her tireless efforts to enhance Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech.

2021

November

Dr. Leif Ellingson is the Principal Investigator, and Dr. Linda Allen the co-PI for the continuance of an NSF Grant worth over $102,000, REU Site: Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Methods in the Life Sciences
 

August

TTU President and Math Professor Dr. Lawrence Schovanec and Dr. Raegan Higgins, and others, received notification of continuance on their NSF grant worth over $2 million for the project Louis Stokes New STEM Pathways Implementation-Only Alliance: The Bridges Across Texas Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation
 
AL
Dr. Amanda Laubmeier won an NSF grant worth almost $193,000 for the project LEAPS-MPS: Predator Competition in Systems with Seasonal Birth.
DV
Dr. Dimitri Volchenkov working via the Institute for Materials, Manufacturing, and Sustainment has obtained a contract with AVX Aircraft worth over $308,000
WG
An NSF grant of over $237,000 for the project Adaptive High Order Low-Rank Tensor Methods for High-Dimensional Partial Differential Equations with Application to Kinetic Simulations has been awarded to Assistant Professor Wei Guo.

July

HT
Dr. Hung Tran won an NSF grant worth almost $212,000 for the project Geometry of Surfaces and Four-Dimensional Manifolds.

May

AP
Dr. Bhagya Athukorallage, known as "Dr. B" by his admiring students, has received the Diamond Award for teaching innovation. Congratulations!

March

AP
Atul Dixit, Assistant Professor at IIT Gandhinagar, has been awarded the 2021 Gabor Szego prize from SIAM for his “impressive scientific work solving problems related to number theory using special functions, in particular related to the work of Ramanujan.” Dixit, while obtaining his Master of Science Degree in Mathematics from Texas Tech University in 2006, composed the Master's thesis Ramanujan's Identities and Monotonicity Properties of Quotients of Theta Functions, jointly supervised by Dr. Solynin and retired TTU Math Professor Barnard. Dixit and Solynin continued their collaborations in the joint paper “Monotonicity of quotients of theta functions related to an extremal problem on harmonic measure” published in J. Math. Anal. Appl. 336 (2007), no. 2.

Congratulations!

February

AP
The TTU Board of Regents has granted tenure to Dr. Angela Peace effective immediately, becoming an Associate Professor this Fall.

The Provost's Office has also announced that Angela Peace is a recipient of the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2021.

The Department celebrates such felicitous news!
FZ
Congratulations to Dr. Fangyuan Zhang for being granted tenure effective immediately and promoted to Associate Professor this coming Fall!  The decision from the TTU Board of Regents is welcome news for the Department.

January

RH
The Association for Women in Mathematics has presented Dr. Raegan Higgins with the 2021 Gweneth Humphreys Award.  This Award recognizes outstanding mentorship of math teachers who have encouraged female undergrad and graduate students to pursue mathematical careers and advanced mathematics study.

Professor Higgins has also been appointed an Office of the Provost Faculty Fellow, and asked by President Schovanec to work in the Faculty Success Initiative, establishing new strategies for faculty recruitment, retention, and success, with a focus on diversity and inclusion of the under-represented.
Dr. Katharine Long whose research grant Infrared-based Technology for Estimating Core Body Temperature from the Sclera Region at the Back of the Eyes has been funded for the Spring and Summer 2021 for $72,577 by XTemp.  Additional funding is anticipated in this innovative endeavor.
The Department welcomes Ozkan Ozturk as a new PostDoc this Spring.  Good to have him on board.
Through the efforts of Dr.'s Lindquist and Rachev, the Department is now offering a new Ph.D. track, Mathematical Finance.  The Dean has approved this new program for Mathematics & Statistics.
 

2020

April

March

RH
Professor Raegan Higgins has been named a 2020 Integrated Scholar by the Office of the Provost.  Integrated Scholars are not only outstanding in teaching, research, and service, but they are also able to generate synergy among the three functions.  Faculty members who are Integrated Scholars consistently promote active learning and infuse the results of their research and scholarship in courses and other learning experiences.  Integrated Scholars publish the results of their teaching innovations in peer-reviewed journals.  Finally, Integrated Scholar faculty members plan and execute service commitments to complement their teaching and research goals.

January

josh
Erdi Kara (advised by Dr. Eugenio Aulisa) received a very competitive travel grant from the American Physical Society (APS) Biophysics Division to attend the APS March meeting and present "Computationally tractable mechanistic model of inhomogeneous -- anisotropic drug diffusion and tumor ablation" based on the following submitted manuscript.

A reporter from APS and contributor to the Washington Post also interviewed one of the co-authors on the topic of mechanistic modeling of cancer biophysics, during which the aforementioned paper, where Erdi is the first author, was discussed during a large portion of the interview. The interview will be formatted into a press release by the APS for the March meeting, after which it may potentially be covered by other news outlets such as the Washington Post.

2019

October

josh
Congratulations to Claudia Muñoz for receiving the 2019 Trjitzinsky Award, a prestigious AMS scholarship: it is a great honor for her, for the Mathematics & Statistics department, and for TTU in general!
Many thanks go to the AMS leadership, as well as our Undergrad Associate Chair Brock Williams for his help in our nomination.

August

josh
Congratulations to TTU Math Post-Doc Joshua Padgett, who, as co-Principal Investigator along with Evdokiya Kostadinova from Baylor, has been awarded an NSF Grant for the project Onset Turbulence in Dusty Plasma Liquids. Job well done!
 toda
The Simons Foundation has awarded TTU Math Professor and Chair Dr. Magdalena Toda a $42,000 grant to be paid over 5 years for her project Applications of Willmore Energy Functionals to Protein Biology. Congratulations Dr. Toda!
 tt
The Department welcomes new tenure track Assistant Professors Kazuo Yamazaki (Applied, PDEs & Stochastic, Ph.D. Oklahoma State 2014), Hung Tran (Geometric Analysis & PDEs, Ph.D. Cornell 2014), and Stamatis Pouliasis (Potential Theory & Complex Analysis, Ph.D. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 2011) in the Fall of 2019.
 tt
Biomathematician Toufik Khyat (Ph.D. Rhode Island 2017) and Geometrist Daniel Grady (Ph.D. Pittsburgh 2015) join TTU Mathematics and Statistics this Fall in PostDoc capacities.  Welcome!

July

 aul
Utilizing the novel concept of coupling finite element methods and material point methods in fluid-structure interaction problems, Professor Aulisa of TTU Math has been awarded a $250,000 NSF grant.  Dr. Aulisa intends to develop computational techniques with a broad spectrum of applications -- cardiovascular valve fluid flow, civil engineering dam breakage, and aerospace airfoil design, among others.  Congratulations Dr. Aulisa!

June

 nsf
Math Professors Brock Williams and Raegan Higgins, along with PI and Education Professor Jerry Dwyer and TTU's Michael Galyean and Jill White, have been awarded an NSF STEM grant worth over $1.1 million!  This is a supplemental grant to the existing Noyce Scholarship program to foster high-quality STEM teacher recruitment.  Congratulations to Dr. Williams and Dr. Higgins!
For more information, click here.

March

 lars
Professor Lars Christensen has received the 2019 Professing Excellence Award.  This honor, was nominated by students and was bestowed on March 27th.  Congratulations Dr. Christensen!
 brock
Dr. Brock Williams received the College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Innovation Award.  Besides the prestige that comes from winning the competitive award established by Dean Lindquist, a monetary prize accompanies the accolade.  Congratulations Dr. Williams!
 wang
New tenure-track Assistant Professor Dr. Chunmei Wang has received an NSF Grant totaling $400,000 distributed incrementally until 2023.  Congratulations, Dr. Wang, and a prestigious beginning to your career here at Texas Tech!
 lars
Professor Lars Christensen has been named 2019 Outstanding Researcher from the College of Arts and Sciences.  Congratulations Dr. Christensen!

2018

October

 allen
The Scientific Computing meets Machine Learning and Life Sciences conference will be held October 7th-9th at the Texas Tech main campus in Lubbock.  Special thanks to the National Science Foundation's grant and Horn Professor Linda Allen for their generous financial support

September

 peace
Dr. Angela Peace was awarded an NSF Grant worth $80,000 that pertains to bettering our understanding of malaria transmission, entitled Collaborative Research: Linking Pharmacokinetics to Epidemiological Models of Vector-Borne Diseases and Drug Resistance Prevention.  A collective award across 5 universities, the total grant is worth $550,000. Congratulations, Dr. Peace!

Department of Mathematics & Statistics