Exciting happenings

With the fall semester underway, we want to highlight a few of the happenings with the RTG.

  • We congratulate Assistant Professor Arunima Bhattacharya who was awarded a new NSF grant DMS-2350290, “Fully Nonlinear Equations and Minimal Submanifolds in Lagrangian Geometry”, which will provide her $234,951 in funding over the next three years!
  • We congratulate Professor Yaiza Canzani on her promotion to full professor, which was effect July 1!
  • Our former undergraduate researcher, Marleigh Purgar-McDonald, just began her graduate studies at Texas A&M.  We wish Marleigh luck with this new endeavor.
  • We similarly wish our former postdoc, Jian Wang, luck with his new position at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques at the Université Paris-Saclay.
  • We welcome two new postdocs to the group:  Hanna Kim and Govanni Granados!  We are looking forward to working with you.
  • We are proud to announce that Jason Metcalfe was recently awarded a 2024 Faculty Mentoring Award from the Carolina Women’s Leadership Council for faculty to junior faculty mentoring.
  • Undergraduate researcher Jonah Boan is amongst the inaugural class of Kennedy Scholars within the Department.  These are possible due to a generous contribution from Dr. Daniel Kennedy in support of undergraduate research.  Jonah will be investingating the isoperimetric problem, a geometric question going back to the ancient Greeks that seeks to identify the shape that maximizes area for a given perimeter. His research focuses on a variant of the problem related to the eigenvalues of the Laplacian, and they will gather numerical data using the finite element method on real projective space.  Congratulations, Jonah!

Research Roundup

We will regularly announce newly posted articles and newly accepted articles within the group.  We are proud to announce the following updates from the past few months.

Benjamin Bechtold, Graduate Student

    • Presentation: Spring 2024 TAGMaC at UNC

Arunima Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor

Maddie Brown, Graduate Student

    • Presentation: Spring 2024 TAGMaC at UNC

Hans Christianson, Professor

Andrew Lyons, Graduate Student

    • Presentation: Spring 2024 TAGMaC at UNC

Jeremy Marzuola, Professor

Casey Rodriguez, Assistant Professor

Jeremy Wall, Graduate Student

Timothy Van Hoose, Graduate Student

    • Presentation: Spring 2024 TAGMaC at UNC

Defended!

Congratulations to Maddie Brown who successfully defended her dissertation, “Fourier Coefficients of Restricted Eigenfunctions”.  It is a beautiful result and was a masterful presentation.  Maddie worked with Yaiza Canzani and Jeff Galkowski, and we also congratulate them. Maddie will be leaving for a postdoctoral position at the University of Auckland, after which she will join Oberlin College & Conservatory as an Assistant Professor.

We are proud of Maddie, wish her luck, and will miss her.

Teaching Award for Casey Rodriguez

Congratulations to RTG faculty member and co-PI Casey Rodriguez!  Casey is one of the 2024 recipients of the Goodman-Petersen Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The Goodman-Petersen Awards were established thanks to a donation from UNC Mathematics Alumni Jennifer Johnson and Janos Kollar, and they are given annually by the Department to faculty for excellence in the teaching of mathematics to undergraduates.  The awards are named after two of our Emeritus Faculty members, Professors Sue Goodman and Karl Petersen, both of whom showed incredible devotion to undergraduate education throughout their careers.

The RTG is privileged and proud to have Casey in the group.  He has mastered the art of delivering deeply rigorous material in digestible ways and using humor to keep students engaged.

Research Roundup

We will regularly announce newly posted articles and newly accepted articles within the group.  We are proud to announce the following updates from the past few months.

Arunima Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor

    • Newly posted: J. Bernstein and A. Bhattacharya, The CR-volume of horizontal submanifolds of spheres.
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: European Congress of Mathematicians: Satellite Conference on Analysis and PDE, Portugal (July 2024)
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: Partial Differential Equations and Convexity, (special session of AMS sectional meeting), San Francisco (May 2024)
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: PDEs in Complex Geometry: Thematic program, Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM), Montréal, Canada, (April 15, 2024)
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: PDE seminar, Indiana University (April 1, 2024)
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: Geometric Analysis Colloquium, Fields Institute, Toronto, Canada (February, 2024)
    • Presentation: Ideas Seminar, Department of Statistics and Operations Research, UNC-Chapel Hill (November 9, 2023)
    • Presentation: Geometry-Topology seminar, North Carolina State University (August 25, 2023)

Maddie Brown, Graduate Student

Yaiza Canzani, Associate Professor

    • Award: Hettleman Prize, UNC
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: 13th Ohio River Analysis Meeting  (March 16-17, 2024)
    • Presentation: 8th Coloquio Uruguayo de Matematica (December 19-21, 2023)

Andrew Lyons, Graduate Student

Jeremy Marzuola, Professor

Casey Rodriguez, Assistant Professor

    • Newly posted and accepted: C. Rodriguez, A midsurface elasticity model for a thin, nonlinear gradient elastic plate, Int. J. Eng. Sci., to appear.
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: PDE Seminar, Georgia Tech (March 26, 2024)
    • Upcoming Invited Talk: Great Lakes Mathematical Physics Meeting (GLaMP), Michigan State University (June 7-9, 2024)
    • Presentation: Colloquium, Virginia Tech (December 1, 2023)

Jeremy Wall, Graduate Student

    • Presentation: Fall 2023 TAGMaC at NCSU (Isoperimetric Inequalities and Function Bounds)
    • Upcoming Event: Helping run the Spring 2024 TAGMaC at UNC-CH.

Jian Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow

Mark Williams, Professor

Research Roundup

We will regularly announce newly posted articles and newly accepted articles within the group.  We are proud to announce the following updates from the past few months.

Arunima Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor

Yaiza Canzani, Associate Professor

Jeremy Marzuola, Professor

Casey Rodriguez, Assistant Professor

James Rowan, Postdoctoral Fellow

Timothy Van Hoose, Graduate Student

Jian Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow

New grants in the group

Congratulations to RTG faculty members Arunima Bhattacharya, Jeremy Marzuola, and Casey Rodriguez on their new grants that were awarded!

  • Arunima was awarded a Travel Support for Mathematicians grant from the Simons Foundation.  The project is titled “Nonlinear PDEs in Lagrangian Geometry” and will run 9/1/2023-8/31/2028.
  • Jeremy’s grant from the National Science Foundation will support the project “Spectral theory and applications for models with localized or boundary defects” from 7/2023-6/2026.
  • Casey’s successful application was titled “Collaborative Research: Strain-limiting Cosserat Rods with Applications to Modeling Biological Fibers” and earned funding from the National Science Foundation for the period 8/1/2023-7/31/2026.

Girls Talk Math

The RTG is excited to welcome the Girls Talk Math program back to campus.  This summer camp was started by two alumni, including Katrina Morgan who is beginning a new faculty position at Temple University and has returned for this year’s camp.  Each year a number of high school students are hosted and dig into challenging problems.  See https://girlstalkmath.com for more info and to follow them on social media.

Congratulations to Michael Taylor

We congratulate Michael Taylor on his retirement after 36 years at UNC.  Michael is a 1970 PhD from Berkeley (with Cordes) and came to UNC in 1987.  Amongst his many accolades, he is an ICM speaker and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  He has made many notable contributions with the fields of analysis and PDE.  He is the author of more than a dozen books including some absolute classics in microlocal analysis and an elegant and famous three volume set on Partial Differential Equations in addition to his classroom texts on analysis, linear algebra, complex analysis, ODE, and measure theory.

The members of the RTG are deeply grateful to Michael for his mentorship, generous sharing of ideas, and enthusiasm for all things in mathematics.