Grad News

A second grant from the US Department of Education provides four Doctoral Fellowships in Areas of National Need. The students who receive these Fellowships will have 50% lower teaching duties to promote their own academic progress. The stipends can be up to $30,000 per year, capped by the level of need of the student, and will run for up to three years. The previous GAANN grant to the Department was awarded two years ago.

A grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents provides three Doctoral Fellowships. The students who receive these Fellowships for studies beginning in fall 2007 will have no teaching duties so they can concentrate on their own studies. The stipends will be $30,000 per year and will run for four years, tuition-free. The Board of Regents Doctoral Fellowships are funded by the Louisiana Educational Quality Support Fund (LEQSF). The Board of Regents manages this fund, which is based on tidelands oil and natural gas royalties paid to the State of Louisiana and constitutionally dedicated by the people of Louisiana to LEQSF. There are many important forms of LEQSF support for Mathematics Department faculty and students for advanced study and research.

Congratulations to Jeremy Becnel, a Mathematics Department Graduate Student, for winning a prestigious Graduate School Dissertation-Year Fellowship for the academic year 2005-6. The Department had a winner of this award also in 2003-4 and 2004-5. These included Dr. Troels Johansen, now a research post-doctoral fellow in the European Union-sponsored HARP (harmonic analysis) research project at Universität Paderborn in Germany. The next recipient was Sarah McAllister, whose PhD was awarded in August 2005. Sarah will be a postdoctoral researcher at the T. J. Watson Research Center of IBM at York

This National Science Foundation grant, awarded to STEM Departments at LSU, will provide $30,000 per calendar year stipends for selected graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics beginning fall 2005. Recipients typically will have passed the General Exam for the PhD. Their duties will be in projects to enhance the quality of mathematics and science instruction in the regional schools.

This 2005 grant, in which Mathematics participates through several of its faculty members, supports research in Multi-Scale Computations of Fluid Dynamics. The $3 million multi-disciplinary award from the National Science Foundation can provide selected advanced graduate students doing research in this field with $30,000 research assistantships for up to two years, as well as travel funds, mini-research grants, and computing equipment.

Dr. Yongdo Lim (LSU PhD graduate in 1996) won a prize from the Korean Mathematics Society for the best paper of the year by a Korean mathematician. The prize was for his paper Birkhoff formula for conformal compressions of symmetric cones, which appeared in the American Journal of Mathematics, Vol 125 (2003),167-182. Congratulations to Dr. Yongdo Lim!

As an academic sponsor of MSRI (Mathematical Sciences Research Institute) at Berkeley, the Department is sending selected graduate students to participate in suitable workshops and in summer graduate programs organized by the Institute. MSRI covers the travel and expenses of the nominated students.

Dr. Robert Osburn (LSU PhD 2001) has been appointed Permanent Lecturer at University College Dublin. This follows his previous appointments to postdoctoral research positions at McMaster University, Queens University, and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. Congratulations to Dr. Osburn!

Dr. Boris Baeumer (LSU PhD 1997) was awarded the Early Career Award for Distinction in Research by the University of Otago in New Zealand. His research on Contaminant Transport in Fractal Media is supported by a prestigious $100,000 Marsden Fund Fast-Start grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Dr. Yu Zhuang (LSU PhD 2000) received from the National Science Foundation Advanced Computation Research Program a two-year award (2003 - 05) to support his research on Scalable Domain Decomposition Algorithms for Solving Parabolic Problems. Congratulations to Dr. Zhuang!