VLADIMIR KOLTCHINSKII NAMED IMS FELLOW

Department Personnel Honored with Awards, Grants and Contracts

  • Gabriel Huerta has been awarded a College of Arts and Sciences Research Summer Award to work on spatial-temporal statistics to assess carbon fluxes and dynamics in a global environmental change experiment at the Sevilleta Ecological research site in central New Mexico.
      
  • Curt Storlie was awarded a contract from Sandia Labs for Summer 2007, to improve upon existing methods of Sensitivity Analyisis for Complex Computer Models.  He will also be implementing some of these methods into a software package for use by analysts at Sandia.
      
  • Pavel Lushnikov was awarded a UNM Research Allocation Committee grant entitled Collapse Turbulence in Plasma, Bose-Einstein Condensation and Oceanic Freak Waves.

    An abstract of Dr. Lushnikov's grant is as follows: The nonlinear Schroedinger equation (NLS), which describes nonlinear interaction of waves, is perhaps the most widespread and universal model in nonlinear science. I plan to study strong turbulence modeled by the NLS dominated by a random distribution of collapse events. Applications of NLS collapse turbulence are ubiquitous including self-focusing in laser-plasma interaction, collapse of Bose-Einstein condensate and formation of freak waves in ocean.
      
  • Adriana Aceves won the Outstanding Lecturer of the Year, it's a campus-wide award that the Office of Support for Effective Teaching gives to a lecturer each year. She was nominated by her students from previous semesters.
      
  • Kara Peterson have been selected to receive a Dean's Dissertation Fellowship fo rher project, Modeling Arctic Sea Ice. The fellowship includes a stipend of $11,000 plus tuition, fringe and health insurance. Kara's PhD advisor is Deborah Sulsky.
      
  • Statistics PhD student Alvaro Nosedal-Sanchez is one of seven TAs at UNM to receive a 2006-07 Susan Deese-Roberts Outstanding Teaching Assistant of the Year Award.
      
  • Undergraduate student Sara Pollock and graduate student Shadi Naderi were both honored by the School of Engineering as NFS Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Scholars.
      
  • Donna George, Coordinator of Program Advisement, successfully completed her requirements for a Doctor of Philosopy in Health, Physical Education, and Recreation.  
      

Faculty Promotions in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics

The department takes pride in announcing that Gabriel Huerta has been granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor; Aparna Huzurbazar and Todd Kapitula have been promoted to the rank of Full Professor.

The promotions (with high marks) come as a reflection of their numerous contributions to the Department over the last several years.

 



Vladimir Koltchinskii, Professor, of the University of New Mexico was named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).  The induction ceremony took place July 28, 2004 at the IMS Annual Meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

Professor Koltchinskii received the award for outstanding research on empirical processes, statistical theory of learning and multivariate statistics.

Each Fellow nominee is assessed by a committee of his/her peers for the award.  In 2004, after reviewing 37 nominations, 12 were selected for Fellowship.  Created in 1933, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics is a member organization which fosters the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability.  The IMS has 3800 active members throughout the world.    Approximately 10% of the IMS membership has earned the status of fellowship.

It should be noted that at this time, ALL Full Statistics Professors in the UNM Department of Mathematics and Statistics are either Fellows of the American Statistical Association (Bedrick, Christensen) or the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (Christensen, Efromovich, Koltchinskii). This is an accomplishment few Departments in the country can claim.

Braiding patterns on an inclined plane: [ This Article in Nature ]
UNM researchers publish water theory

Professors Vakhtang Putkaradze (Department of Mathematics & Statistics) and Peter Vorobieff (Mechanical Engineering) and graduate student Keith Mertens (Department of Mathematics & Statistics) describe the theory and experiment on hydrodynamic instability in a research paper published in Nature, a respected peer-reviewed science magazine.

Putkaradze said Mertens, who Vorobieff credits for 60 percent of the project, was responsible for making the experiment elegant and sophisticated. [MORE]


Professor Stanly Steinberg was appointed a Fulbright Senior Specialist in January. As part of the specialist program, he will visit Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Francisco Morazán in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in June.

Dr. Deborah Sulsky

   [From the HPC newsletter of June, 2004]




Deborah Sulsky is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.  Dr. Sulsky has been a member of the Accociated Research Faculty since the inception of the HPC, and helped establish the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) certificate program.

She joined the UNM faculty in 1987 and has been developing mathematical models and numerical tools to solve  problems in diverse areas such as embryology, ecology, and mechanics.  She likens her role in research to being a detective following the clues to understanding how Nature works. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers to help solve mysteries. [more]

Notes From Donna George ( Coordinator, Program Advisement )

Summer is here! Seems like time is really jetting by this year! Here are a few more pieces of news about students that I gathered after the last news letter(s) went out.

Andrey Glubokov won one of the five Teaching Assistant of the Year awards at the University of New Mexico. This is quite an honor considering there are more than 500 teaching assistants at UNM! Congratulations Andrey!

Samantha Gallegos who graduated this Spring was accepted into the Master's of Secondary Education Resident Teacher Program. Congratulations and best of luck.

Chen Meng, a Ph.D. in Statistics is attending and presenting at a Research Society on Alcoholism in Vancover B.C.

Agate Ponder-Sutton will be attending a summer conference. Don't have much more information but this is a two week resident conference.

Tatiana Marquez-Lago won a CONACYT Fellowship for 2004-2005.

Karin Leiderman was awarded an RA in Utah for the summer and she defended her thesis with Distinction.

Karin, Tatiana Marquez-Lago and Flor Espinoza-Hidalgo all got fellowships to attend a workshop in Honduras!

Tomas Dohnal and Erik Andries both received RPT grants from OGS for travel this semester.

Elizabeth (Betty) Malloy received a post doctoral fellowship at Harvard. Congratulations Betty!

Graduating this Spring are the following graduate students:

Margaret Farley MS Statistics
Yizhou (Joey) Jiang MS Statistics (he continues on the PhD program)
Walter Kehowski PhD Pure Mathematics
Karin Leiderman MS Applied Mathematics
Yan Lu MS Statistics
Elizabeth Malloy PhD Statistics
Derek Martinez PhD Pure Mathematics
Igor Nazarov PhD Applied Mathematics
Harold Nelson MS Statistics
Salvador Rodriques MS Applied Mathematics
Robert Seletsky MS Applied Mathematics
Xiaowei Sun MS Statistics
Manping Wang MS Statistics
Wenxia Ying MS Statistics
Hua Zhong MS Statistics

 

The following Undergraduate Majors graduate this Spring in Mathematics:

Ai Teh-Chih T BS Computational
Christopher Apodaca BS Math Education
Kim Armstrong BS Applied
Luman Beno BS Math Education
Brian Benzel BS Computational
Courtney Bradley Thompson BS Applied
Rosona Eldred BS Pure (summa cum laude)
Joshua Fristoe BS Applied
Samantha Gallegos BS Math Education
Raemon Gurule BS Applied
Kit Y Kan BS Applied (cum laude)
Caroline Khors BS Distributed (magna cum laude)
Tyler McCormick BS Applied
Megan Melin BS Applied
Mark Murmer, BS Math Education (cum laude)
A. D. Riddle BS Math Education (cum laude)
Alex Rinehart BS Distributed (summa cum laude and Departmental Honors)
Belin Tsinnajinie BS Distributed
Eric Wenlinger BS Applied Statistics

 

Majors Graduating this May:

John Barela BS Statistics (cum laude)
Jeffrey Hanson BS Statistics
Joshua Love BS Statistics
Shawn Marris BS Statistics (cum laude)
Daren Ruiz BS Statistics
Jacob Zhender BS Statistics (cum laude)

 

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OUR GRADUATES!!!!

This year our Department participated in the UNM Annual Spring Storm. Representing the Department were Pavel Cherepanov, Kathy Shen, Jim Dudley, Vickie and Jeff Kauffman and myself. Thanks everybody for participating and we hope next year more of you will be able to join us. Unfortunately, this year it coincided with the Math Contest doings and many of our students and staff were volunteering for that event as well. Anyway, we all had fun and we did our community service work at Casa Esperanza.

Admissions for Graduate Students are almost over for Fall 2004. We had well over 70 applications for the coming fall. That number is up significantly from previous years. We have 8 brand new TA's coming to the campus this summer to begin studying in our programs.

I won't know how many other graduate students will be arriving until the semester begins, but we can count on five to fifteen new graduate students plus the 8 TA's. Currently we have 114 graduate students. This number does not count our 15 Spring graduating Graduates (which would bring that number up to 129) and the 15 or so who will be added in the fall.

We have 185 current undergraduate majors and this does not count the 23 who are graduating, so until May 15 we have 208 undergraduate majors! Needless to say, our department is growing daily. I think one thing that draws students to us besides our excellent programs is the congeniality of the faculty and staff. Our warmth and willingness to talk to students makes us a very popular major. We welcome all our new majors and graduate students.

That's all I have for now, thanks, Donna