“I have worked with combustion theory problems. Now I’m working quite a bit in population ecology. I have a co-investigator who is a renowned ecologist at Louisiana State University. We’re trying to model mathematically what his team discovers through field research.  

“We’re looking at competing and cooperating species inside a certain region – things like that. How the two species interact is complicated — they might cooperate in the interior of the region, but when they come to the boundary they might compete. In the past, mathematical ecology was more focused only on the interior of a region. Now we’re looking at how exterior regions can also impact what’s happening in the interior. We build mathematical models and analyze them to provide answers.” 

“One of the things I like about our program is that, even though I’m not a computational expert, all my PhD students are now experts in both analytical plus computational mathematics, thanks to fantastic colleagues in my department, like Dr. Tom Lewis and Dr. Yi Zhang. They are on my students’ committees and work with them on the computational components. So we’re graduating students competent on both sides. That’s a big plus. They have a different flavor when they go into the mathematics job hunt.”