Fall 2002
| Faculty Grants and Awards | |
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Million Dollar Grant: Modeling Septic Shock
Professors Carson Chow (project leader) and Greg Constantine of the
Pitt Math Department are members of a NIH-NSF funded multidisciplinary team
modeling septic shock.
Carson writes: If you are infected or traumatically injured, your body mounts a defensive response to eliminate the pathogens and damaged tissue, then restore your body back to healthy function. Symptoms of this Recently, Pitt faculty in the departments of mathematics, statistics, critical care medicine and surgery have been awarded a joint NSF and NIH grant in mathematical biology to attempt to tackle this perplexing disease. One reason for the failure of finding effective therapies is that the acute inflammatory response is a highly complex system involving many interacting elements. Currently, most medical research focuses on targeting single elements. However, the ultimate consequence of modulating that element is impossible to predict from the knowledge of the actions of that element in isolation. What is needed is a global understanding of the entire response. This is where mathematics can play a role. The actions of these immune cells and cytokines can be modeled mathematically. The goal is to create a `virtual patient' where therapies can be designed and tested. If sophisticated enough, the model could be used for real time predictions of patient outcomes. Currently, the Pitt effort is combining methods from dynamical systems theory, perturbation theory, numerical simulations, statistical analysis, and animal experiments to undertake this challenge. |
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Pitt Math Professor Collaborates with Nobel Winner
The 2002 Nobel prize winner in Economics, Vernon Smith, is a long time
collaborator of Professor Gunduz Caginalp.
Together they have modeled the human behavior of Wall Street investors and investigated how this affects the movement of stocks. The approach is an unconventional combination of `hard' mathematical analysis and `soft' psychology. Their work is explored in a recent PittChronicle titled The Psychology of Stock Markets, and also in Math prof collaborates with Nobel winner from the University Times. |
| New Faculty | |
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Assistant Professor: Dave Saunders
David Saunders received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in
2001. His main research interests are Mathematical Finance and
Stochastic Optimization.
Before joining the faculty at Pitt, Dr. Saunders was a professor at the Cyprus International Institute of Management and a research fellow at the University of Cyprus.
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Assistant Professor:
Beatrice Riviere
Beatrice Riviere's research interests include the mathematical analysis
and the numerical studies of finite element methods for solving general
partial differential equations. After receiving a Master at
Pennsylvania State University and a PhD at the
University of Texas at Austin in 2000, Beatrice was a postdoctoral fellow
at the Center for Subsurface Modeling at the University of Texas.
Beatrice is particularly interested in numerical methods that can handle unstructured meshes, local and high order of approximation, and that can yield very accurate solutions. Her work includes some of the first analysis of several discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for elliptic and parabolic equations. Applications of DG methods arise from the geosciences community where local mass conservation is crucial. Beatrice's current research deals with the analysis and implementation of DG methods to seismic wave propagation, incompressible flow and multiphase flow. Both a priori and a posteriori analysis are investigated. A general adaptive software platform, developed over the last five years, allows for numerical simulations of realistic problems. |
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Postdoc: Jared Anderson
Jared Anderson is from Victoria, British Columbia. He earned a degree in
math and physics from the University of Victoria in 1996, and a PhD from
Princeton in 2000, where his advisor was Robert MacPherson. Since then he
has been postdocing, first at the University of Massachusetts, now at the
University of Pittsburgh.
His research interests are in geometry and topology, and his work has applications to algebra, combinatorics, and Lie theory. Although he never expected it, Jared also enjoys teaching, and likes students. |
| Picture Perfect | |
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Math and the Energy Crisis Faced with warnings of an energy crisis, there are plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Amid a storm of criticism from environmental groups, the oil industry has claimed that new techniques mean that the drilling can be done in an environmentally sound way. Pitt math professor Beatrice Riviere explains, with examples from her own work, how advanced math modeling makes this possible. More >> |
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