Texas Tech University

Faculty, Staff, and Student News

2018    2019    2020    2021    2022    2023

2024

November

Bari Hridoy
Bari Hridoy and TTU Chapter SIAM President Jagdish Gnawali have both won travel grants to the AMS 2025 National Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle this January.  Congratulations!
Jagdish Gnawali
  

October

Rifat Rejuan
Graduate Student Rifat Rejuan presented a poster at the 7th Annual SIAM Conference Texas-Louisiana Section deemed outstanding by Conference Organizers.  Congratulations are in order for Mr. Rejuan — job well done!

September

Magda Toda
Department Chair Dr. Magda Toda has been selected an Association for Women in Mathematics 2025 Fellow for her outstanding leadership in supporing women and girls in mathematics.  Having received the information about this award on her birthday, she wrote this was her "best birthday gift ever."  Congratulations, Dr. Toda!
Angela Peace
Dr. Angela Peace has the departmental recommendation for promotion to Full Professor.  As one of the top 3% of cited researchers in her field, and having been awarded over $1 million in NSF grants and been involved with NSF grants and initiatives amounting to roughly $3 million, Mathematics and Statistics is grateful to have her at Texas Tech.
Leif Ellingson
For his substantial contributions in the field of Statistics and hard work in the Department, Dr. Leif Ellingson has earned promotion to Full Professor.  The Department is fortunate to have such an esteemed, capable and affable colleague manage so many matters.  
Dmitri Pavlov
Dr. Dmitri Pavlov has been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor.  Pavlov works in homotopy theory, and his recent research in functorial quantum field theory and cobordism has been recognized and we look forward to greater outcomes for mathematics as he pursues his contributions in the field.  
Ignacio Tomas
Dr. Ignacio Tomas won an NSF Grant, DMS-2409841 Hydrodynamic models of electric charge transport: structure-preserving numerical methods, for almost $220,000 running through August 2027.  In addition to the NSF Award, he has also been selected for a $42,000 2024 Simons Travel Support for Mathematicians grant.   Quite the month for Dr. Tomas!
Dermot McCarthy
Associate Professor Dermot McCarthy has won a 2024 Simons Travel Support for Mathematicians grant worth $42,000.  Dr. McCarthy has also been recommendeded for promotion to Full Professor by the department.
2024 Quad Fellow Bradley Vigil
Chosen from a highly competitive international field of many thousands, TTU Mathematics and Statistics Ph.D. student Bradley Vigil was selected as one of fifty 2024 Quad Fellows.  Mr. Vigil's esteemed Fellowship demonstrates the committment the Department has to interdisciplinary research in expanding the reach of mathematics and statistics while igniting the energies of bright, young minds towards important goals.

April

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

March

Bradley Vigil
PhD. candidate Bradley Vigil was awarded a Charles S. Peirce Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship by the Institute for Studies in Pragmatism for his work in Topological Data Analysis. Congratulations are in order.

February

Raegan Higgins
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.
Travis Thompson
Assistant Professor Travis Thompson was named to the editorial board of the prestigious journal Brain-Multiphysics this February.  The international journal has accomplished members from California and other US Universities, Europe, Singapore to Taiwan and bespeaks the good company Dr. Thompson works with.

January

Hung Tran
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.
Juntao Huang
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.
Dimitri Volchenkov
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

Texas Tech Logo
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!
News Article Photo
The Texas Tech Mathematics and Statistics Department has been rated 69th by College Factual for the best Ph.D. programs in the country.

August

Juntao Huang
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.
Travis Thompson
Dr. Travis Thompson was awarded a $519,526 grant from the NSF Division Of Mathematical Sciences.  The grant, DMS-2325276, Mouth to Mind: Leveraging network dynamical systems and software to understand diet, diabetes, dementia and modifiable risk factors delaying Alzheimer's disease, runs until August 2026.

May

Yifan Wang
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

Eugenio Aulisa
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

Zari Rachev
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

Raegan Higgins
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.
Brock Williams
Dr. Brock Williams received an NSF Grant worth $208,818 over three years for the project SBP: Collaborative Research: Culturally Relevant Mentorship for Enhancing STEM Identity and Career Interests

September

Kazuo Yamazaki
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
  
Lars Christensen
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

Raegan Higgins
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

Lars Christensen
Dr. Lars Christensen had his Presidential Excellence in Research Professorship renewed through 2025.
Brock Williams
And Dr. Brock Williams also had his Presidential Excellence in Research position renewed through 2025.

May

Magda Toda
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

Leif Ellingson
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

Lawrence Schovanec
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
Raegan Higgins
  
Amanda Laubmeier
Dr. Amanda Laubmeier won an NSF grant worth almost $193,000 for the project LEAPS-MPS: Predator Competition in Systems with Seasonal Birth.
Dimitri Volchenkov
Dr. Dimitri Volchenkov working via the Institute for Materials, Manufacturing, and Sustainment has obtained a contract with AVX Aircraft worth over $308,000
Wei Guo
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

Huan Tran
Dr. Hung Tran won an NSF grant worth almost $212,000 for the project Geometry of Surfaces and Four-Dimensional Manifolds.
Alvaro Pampano
Dr. Álvaro Pámpano has been awarded a 2021-2022 American Mathematical Society Travel Grant

May

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

March

March Awards Winners
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

Angela Peace
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!
Fangyuan Zhang
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

Raegan Higgins
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.
Katherine Long
 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.
Ozkan Ozturk
 The Department welcomes Ozkan Ozturk as a new PostDoc this Spring.  Good to have him on board.
Brent Lindquist
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.
Zari Rachev
  

2020

April

Texas Tech Double T Logo
Associate Dean for Arts & Sciences' message concerning Spring 2020 Grades

March

Raegan Higgins
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

Erdi Kara
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

Claudia Munoz
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 Padgett
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!
 Magda 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!
 Texas Tech Double T Logo
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.
 Texas Tech Double T Logo
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

 Eugenio Aulisa
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 Logo
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 Christensen
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 Williams
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!
 Chunmei 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 Christensen
Professor Lars Christensen has been named 2019 Outstanding Researcher from the College of Arts and Sciences.  Congratulations Dr. Christensen!

2018

October

 Linda 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

 Angela 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 Newsletter

Department of Mathematics & Statistics

© 2024  Texas Tech University Nov 25, 2024 10:46 AM