Department Of Mathematics, Kansas State University
| August 2006 : | Three new professors and four postdocs join the department. |
| This fall Ricardo Castano-Bernard, Diego Maldonado and Virginia Naibo
joined our department as new faculty and Ryan Berndt, Ivan Blank, Sean
Lawton and Silvia Onofrei joined our department as postdocs.
Ricardo's research stands at the crossroads of three areas of mathematics: Symplectic Geometry, Integrable Systems and Mirror Symmetry. All these areas come together as parts of a fascinating new model of the universe: String Theory. String Theory is an ambitious project to explain Einstein's relativity theory together with Quantum Mechanics in a consistent, grand unified way. In this new theory, the space-time is 10-dimensional, with the extra 6 dimensions comprised by spaces called Calabi-Yau manifolds. Physicists observed that these spaces often arise in pairs in a rather mysterious way. An important question that has puzzled both String Theorists and Mathematicians is to understand how these pairs are related. This relation is called Mirror Symmetry. Mirror Symmetry has motivated some of the most astonishing advances in Algebraic Geometry and Symplectic Geometry of the last 15 years. Ricardo became interested in Mirror Symmetry during his graduate studies in the United Kingdom. He made important contributions to understand the symplectic geometry of Calabi-Yaus by importing techniques from apparently unrelated areas of mathematics such as Integrable Hamiltonian Systems. Ricardo's contribution to Mirror Symmetry granted him the PhD in Mathematics for the University of Warwick. Before joining the Mathematics Faculty at K-State, Ricardo held several postdoctoral positions at some of the most prestigious research institutes worldwide such as the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy; Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Science in Leipzig, Germany; Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics, Bonn Germany; and, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, in Paris France. Diego obtained his PhD from the University of Kansas in 2005 under Prof. Rodolfo Torres. His thesis was on multilinear aspects of Fourier Analysis. Afterwards, he worked with the Norbert Wiener Center (NWC) as a Post Doctoral Research Associate and Insructor from 2005-2006. The NWC is part of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland and was created by Prof. John J. Benedetto. During this period he worked on signal processing, in particular, designing wavelet-based compression schemes for terrain elevation data. Prof. Maldonado's research areas include Harmonic Analysis (singular integrals and Littlewood-Paley theory), Applied Fourier Analysis (wavelets in image processing) and Nonlinear Elliptic PDEs (Monge-Ampere operator). His webpage is http://www.math.ksu.edu/~dmaldona/ Virginia obtained her PhD from Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina, in 2002 under Prof. Hugo Aimar and L. Forzani. Afterwards, she worked in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kansas as a posdoctoral fellow and instructor, from 2002 to 2005. She was then appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana. Prof. Naibo's research areas include Fourier Analysis (differentiation of integrals, maximal functions, function spaces) and Dispersive PDEs (Schrodinger equation, Strichartz/dispersive estimates). Her webpage is http://www.math.ksu.edu/~vnaibo/ Ryan Berndt came from Ohio State University where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and works in Harmonic Analysis. Ivan Blank earned his PhD at NYU and was a Hill assistant professor at Rutgers. Before comming here. His advisor was Luis Caffarelli and he studies free boundary problems and elliptic and parabolic PDEs. Sean Lawton graduated with his Ph.D. from University of Maryland, College Park. He works on Moduli and invariant theory of surface group representations. He has a wife (Deb) and daughter (Jaeda) and is excited to be expecting his second daughter this May. Silvia Onofrei graduated with her Ph.D. from K-State in 2003. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside; from 2003-2006 before returning here as a postdoc. Her research interests are: finite groups and their geometries; modular representation theory of finite groups; and the mod-$p$ cohomology theory of finite groups. |