I received a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics in 1983 from the University of California in Berkeley. I spent 1984-1987 as a postdoc at the Courant Institute and came to Michigan in 1987. My honors include a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (1984-1987), a 45-minute invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto (1990), and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship (2000-2003). One of my Ph.D. students, Keith Lindsay, won the Sumner B. Myers Prize in 1998 from the Mathematics Department and the Richard C. DiPrima Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2000, for his thesis.
I am an applied mathematician working in the field of scientific computing. My goal is to develop accurate and efficient algorithms for computer simulation of physical processes. I have several ongoing projects in fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics. One application I'm studying in fluid dynamics is the stability of aircraft trailing vortices. The most recent work in this project led to an unexpected connection with chaotic Hamiltonian systems. I'm also developing fast treecode algorithms for electrostatics in molecular dynamics simulations. An important application is the protein folding problem in structural biochemistry, i.e. predicting the three-dimensional shape of a protein from knowledge of its amino acid sequence. These projects are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor Fund.
Computer simulation is pervasive in modern scientific inquiry. It is routinely used in many branches of engineering and science, and is increasingly applied in other fields such as finance and medicine. There is strong demand for scientific computing professionals in academia, industry, and national laboratories, and the field offers excellent career opportunities for mathematicians.
I welcome inquiries from students and postdocs with potential interest in joining my group.
