“Students are my research collaborators and friends. We often form teams of PhD students, master’s students, and undergraduates to work on a project. I love to see undergraduates experience the excitement of discovery. They often do not get this adventure in their classes.
“We all get together either in the department or in the coffee shop – we don’t need labs. We will have coffee, have lunch, and we’ll continue to have fun working on research problems.
“That’s what I always emphasize for my students: ‘Let’s have fun doing research.’”
“A region could be anything – a lake, a metal plate, or whatever. Then comes the issue that I’m very interested in: measuring a quantity – like population density or temperature – at a specific position at a specific time. The quantity changes due to reactions – like births and deaths and external forces, due to diffusion – like the effects of crowding, and due to the nature of the boundary. For example, if you’re looking at a lake as the region and the exterior is land, that’s a hostile boundary because crossing is impossible for many species. With other kinds of boundaries, an animal population might come into a region and then go back out more easily.”
“In these systems, I’m looking for long-term, steady state measures of a particular quantity – this happens when the quantity in a certain position essentially stops changing over time. That may or may not happen. We attempt to determine if there is a unique steady state, multiple steady states, or no steady states. Identifying steady states is very important to understanding time-dependent dynamics in a system.