Life After Davis: Professors in Oregon

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. Saenz Rodriguez and Patel both look back on their time at UC Davis as a formative stage in their career.

After UC Davis, Saenz Rodriguez and Patel held a variety of postdoctoral positions before starting their tenure-track positions at OSU. Saenz Rodriguez was a Mary Ann Pitts postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia, and also had postdoctoral positions at Tulane University and University of Warwick. Patel was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, Tulane University, and University of Warwick. Patel and Saenz Rodriguez have both held visiting research positions at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute. Patel has been an invited researcher at the Kavli Institute of Physics and Saenz Rodriguez has been a visiting professor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Patel is a co-founder of the “Math for All” conference, an annual conference made up of multiple satellite events across the country aimed at building an inclusive and inviting mathematics community.