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.
Our undergraduate math programs are thriving! Last Winter, undergraduate programs underwent its seven-year Program Review. The external reviewers described our Department “to be dynamic, welcoming and a great place to study Mathematics” and said that our program’s strength was centered around “committed faculty, lecturers, staff and TA’s that come together to deliver a strong program to incoming students through to graduate education.”
This past academic year, the Department awarded 184 degrees!
With the anticipation of Data Science activities in full swing at UC Davis, in Fall 2020, our campus decided to renovate the first floor and basement of the former Physical Sciences and Engineering Library (PSEL) for the use of campus-wide Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) related activities. The renovation was finally completed in December 2023.
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.
Shizhou Xu, originally from China, earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2024 under the supervision of Professor Thomas Strohmer. His research focuses on the intersection of mathematics and trustworthy artificial intelligence, with particular emphasis on fairness, privacy, interpretability, and robustness in machine learning.
Kiseok Yeon joined UC Davis as a Krener Assistant Professor this Fall quarter. His main research interest lies on analytic number theory (especially the Hardy-Littlewood method), theory of exponential sums and its applications, and analytic methods in connection with rational points on varieties.
Aside from mathematics, he loves playing tennis and running. He would love to be contacted if Department members want to do exercise together – he loves all kind of exercises!
Oliver Siebert works in mathematical quantum theory, mainly using tools from functional analysis (including spectral theory, operator theory, operator algebras). Currently, he is interested in many-body theory with applications to quantum information (Lieb-Robinson bounds, area laws), and in non-relativistic QED/Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonians. He completed his Ph.D. in 2021 at the University of Jena under the supervision of David Hasler. Following that, he worked as a postdoc with Marius Lemm at EPFL and the University of Tübingen.
Jared Krandel is a new KAP who will be starting at UC Davis in January 2025. He graduated from Stony Brook University in Spring 2024 and is spending this Fall as a postdoc at SLMath in Berkeley. Most of his work so far has been in an area of geometric measure theory called quantitative rectifiability. He studies geometric properties of rectifiable curves and surfaces through things like analyst's traveling salesman problems, characterizations of uniform rectifiability, parameterizability problems, and more.
