New
Faculty
Noha Abdelghany
joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences as an assistant teaching professor in 2022. Her research interests are in algebraic coding theory, the math that’s behind the scenes of many areas of communications, including television, email and text messaging. In her research, Abdelghany works to design error-correcting codes that can reliably transmit information across noisy channels. Although teaching is her primary focus, she plans to continue her research and looks forward to interacting with students in a research capacity.
Abdelghany earned her Ph.D. at Western Michigan University. As a visiting assistant professor at Colby College, she discovered that she enjoyed teaching and interacting with students and being a role model to minority math students, including international students, non-native speakers and women.
Theresa Anderson
joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences as an assistant professor in 2022. Her research interests are in harmonic analysis and number theory, particularly their interplay. Anderson gravitates toward math problems that she can approach from a variety of perspectives. Her recent work has been in discrete variants of objects and tools from harmonic analysis, lattice point counting including distribution of prime vectors on surfaces, structure theorems in harmonic analysis, and development of Fourier analytic methods in arithmetic statistics.
After receiving her master’s degree and Ph.D. from Brown University, she completed an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and stayed on as the Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professor. In 2018, she joined the faculty at Purdue University as an assistant professor.
Drew Bridges
joined the Department of Biological Sciences as an assistant professor in 2022. He studies how bacteria make developmental decisions based on extracellular sensory information. He’s particularly interested in the formation and disassembly of multicellular bacterial communities called biofilms. Bridges pioneered the use of new imaging approaches to investigate the full biofilm life cycle in the global pathogen Vibrio cholerae, from initial cell attachment to biofilm disassembly. To discover and characterize the molecular mechanisms controlling biofilm dispersal, he combines imaging approaches with techniques including genetics, biochemistry and biophysics theory. His discoveries will be relevant to infection and could inform the development of approaches to manipulate bacterial behavior, potentially leading to new strategies for controlling disease.
Bridges earned his Ph.D. from Dartmouth University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.
Valentina Dutta
joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor in 2022. Her research focuses on the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. She’s interested in taking advantage of the latest techniques in machine learning to improve sensitivity toward new physics that may be particularly challenging to discover experimentally. Dutta has worked on searches for supersymmetry with the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, and she’s a member of a collaboration working on the proposed Light Dark Matter eXperiment, which aims to search for dark matter in the sub-GeV mass range.
After receiving her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dutta did postdoctoral work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she worked for an additional two years as an assistant project scientist.
Isaac Garcia Bosch
joined the Department of Chemistry as an associate professor in 2021. His research takes inspiration from metalloenzymes to develop 3D metal complexes that catalyze organic transformations under environmentally benign conditions using cheap reagents such as Cu, and green oxidants such as O2 or H2O2. His lab studies the reaction pathways by which Cu/O2 intermediates perform selective C-H hydroxylation reactions. They also are developing Cu complexes bearing redox-active ligands with tunable H-bonding donors that catalyze bioinspired dehydrogenation and C-H functionalization reactions.
Garcia-Bosch obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Girona, and then moved to Johns Hopkins University as a Marie Curie IOF Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2015, he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Southern Methodist University as Harold A. Jeskey Endowed Chair in Chemistry – Assistant Professor.
Gabriel Gomes
joined the Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in 2022. He is a machine learning expert who trains computers to develop intuition for chemical reactions. His research areas include catalysis and reaction design, artificial intelligence and computer science for chemistry, organic materials, automated chemical synthesis and physical organic chemistry. Gomes’ goal is to establish a program focused on the development of new chemical reactions, pioneering research and training the next generation of chemists and chemical engineers.
Gomes earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Florida State University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto where he was awarded the prestigious NSERC Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2022, Gomes was named to Chemical & Engineering News’ “Talented 12” list of rising stars in chemistry.
Vladyslav Kozi
joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor in 2022. His research interests cover a number of topics in condensed matter physics, with a particular emphasis on topological or otherwise exotic superconductivity and strongly interacting topological systems. Recently, his efforts have been focused on the search of the microscopic origin and novel properties of topological superconductors, transport and optical properties of interacting topological materials, and hydrodynamics of electrons. In his work, Kozii aims to address both questions of fundamental importance and those having a clear connection to existing or ongoing experiments.
Kozii earned his master’s degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral associate in materials sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley.
Robin Neumayer
joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences as an assistant professor in 2021. Her research lies at the interface of the calculus of variations, partial differential equations, and geometric analysis. She currently is focusing on several problems at the crossroads of analysis and geometry that are united by a central theme: the use of functional and geometric inequalities as a tool to explore the geometry of a manifold or domain. These kinds of inequalities are used to describe ground states for physical systems, such as those in acoustics and materials science.
Neumayer completed her master’s degree and Ph.D. at the University of Texas, Austin. She was an RTG Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, where she took a one-year leave of absence to join a special program on Variational Methods in Geometry at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Fangwei Si
joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor in 2022. His research interests are focused on the drive to discover “biological laws” that can help to understand living systems in a quantitatively precise way. Toward this goal, he develops/adapts tools, does rigorous measurements and defines new concepts. Si’s research group is searching for simple yet fundamental rules connecting the complicated form of bacterial cells and their fitness in different environments, specifically focusing on cell surfaces and bacteria-phage interactions.
Si earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and completed two postdoctoral fellowships, one in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute and another in the Department of Physics and Section of Molecular Biology, University of California, San Diego.
Grigory Tarnopolskiy
joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor in 2021. His research interests span a variety of problems in high energy physics theory and condensed matter physics theory. His current research focuses on two major topics: twistronics and critical phenomena. Twistronics includes understanding physical properties of different Moiré superlattices, particularly twisted bilayer or multilayer graphene. Tarnopolskiy’s recent research on critical phenomena focused on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and other related systems, which exhibit many interesting properties such as non-Fermi liquid behavior, maximal chaos and spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Tarnopolskiy earned his master’s degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.
Konstantin Tikhomirov
joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences as an associate professor in 2022. His research interests include probability and combinatorics, as well as discrete and convex geometry. Much of Tikhomirov’s work has centered on asymptotic geometric analysis, random matrices and random graphs, as well as probabilistic combinatorics.
Tikhomirov obtained his candidate of sciences degree from Samara State University in Russia, and his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, Canada. He did postdoctoral work at Princeton University and was a Viterbi Postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California. In 2018, he joined the faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology as an assistant professor.