Life After Davis

Hello, UC Davis Math Department! I spent four years at UC Davis and completed my Ph.D. with Thomas Strohmer on applications of Compressive Sensing (CS) in 2009. Due to my previous time spent in industry, I was a non-traditional student. This gave me more focus because I basically knew what I was interested in.  I had experience in electrical engineering and physics, so CS was a good fit for me. (Fun fact: the Math Dept used to be in Kerr Hall. In my second semester we all moved to the newly constructed MSB!)

The last time UC Davis saw me was when graduated in the summer of 2018 with a Ph.D. in Mathematics. My dissertation was in low-dimensional topology under Abby Thompson, focusing on Heegaard splittings of knot complements in the 3-sphere (with additional mentorship of Javier Arsuaga in the application of knot theory to molecular biology, particularly the folding of chromosomes in yeast). Only a few months prior to that, I had accepted an offer to join the faculty at University of the Pacific (UOP) in Stockton, CA, as a tenure-track assistant professor of applied mathematics.

I got my Bachelors of Science in Mathematics at UC Davis in 1987. I worked as an actuary on defined benefit pension plans for about 5 years, then I worked at a management consulting firm in Menlo Park called Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) for about 5 years. At ADA we did market research, market modeling, market analysis, decision analysis, and risk analysis. I started doing pricing strategy for tech companies in Silicon Valley in 1997 and I'm still at it.

After earning her B.S. in Mathematics in 1966,  Joan Marie Peters Ogden was a GS-7 mathematician in the Ships' Engineering section in the U.S. Navy in 1966 and 1967. While there, she helped NASA with mathematic modeling for naval ships, modeling ships motions to drive the hydraulics necesary for keeping the communication dish steady, to keep the dishes trained correctly during the Apollo Program.

I spent 10 wonderful years at Davis, completing both my B.S. and Ph.D. in the Department. During my final year of grad school, I interned as a Pathways intern at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and after completing my Ph.D. in 2021, joined NASA as a full time research scientist. 

After graduating from UC Davis, I went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1983. I taught for six years as an assistant professor at UC Irvine before moving to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where I still teach. Being at a liberal arts college has allowed me to stretch beyond my formal area of expertise. I have done that extensively, working in areas as far-flung as sports psychology, political geography, communications theory, public health, economics pedagogy, as well as a bit of economics. 

Swati Patel and Axel Saenz Rodriguez are Assistant Professors in the Mathematics Department at Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, OR. Saenz Rodriguez and Patel were both graduate students in the Math and Applied Math Department at UC Davis, where they first met. They are now married and have two beautiful and energetic children. Patel works in math bio, modeling systems arising from evolution, disease dynamics and ecology. Saenz Rodriguez works in probability and math physics, analyzing universal probabilistic objects for one-dimensional interacting particle systems.

Recent emeritus Blake Temple is keeping busy reporting on new results.