Jason DeVita received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Michigan in 2006. Now a VIGRE postdoc at UCLA, he researches various aspects of statistical physics and growth processes. He has done work on fractal growth, and epitaxial growth of crystals. His current work is on front propagation in reaction diffusion, and on the role of fluctuations in plasma physics. He is working closely with Russel Caflisch.

Edward Lee received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in the fall of 2004, under the supervision of S.T. Yau. His research interests are in algebraic geometry, particularly the geometry of Calabi-Yau varieties and mirror symmetry.

Kenley Jung has been a VIGRE Postdoc since the fall of 2004. His research interests lie in operator algebras, and in particular, free probability and the recent homology theory of Connes and Shlyakhtenko. His current work involves free entropy dimension and its connections to subfactors of finite index. He is an active participant in the functional analysis seminar at UCLA in which he has already presented some of his current research.

Yevgeniy Kovchegov was born in 1976. He received his undergarduate degree from NYU in 1997, and his Ph.D from Stanford math department in 2002. In his Ph.D thesis he derives the Brownian bridge assymptotics for subcritical phase of Bernoulli bond percolation, self-avoiding walks and other probabilistic models. Yevgeniy's thesis adviser was Amir Dembo. In the two years since joining UCLA in the Summer of 2002, Yevgeniy has researched various questions in the field of probability and stochastic processes. He has done work on interacting particle systems, edge-reinforced processes and random walks in random environments.

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Benjamin Miller received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in the spring of 2004, under the supervision of John Steel (at U.C. Berkeley) and Alexander Kechris (at Caltech). His research is in descriptive set theory, particularly the study of countable Borel equivalence relations and its interactions with ergodic theory.

Carmeliza completed a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the University of California at Davis under the supervision of Arthur J. Krener in 2002. In her thesis, she proved the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the dynamic programming equations with nondiffeomorphic maps and developed a high order method for approximating the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDE in multi-dimension. She has also worked on algorithms for solving large Riccati equations arising in optimal control of PDEs.

At UCLA, Carmeliza has worked on applying numerical techniques for conservation law in control problems and using control theoretic formulation to solve static and dynamic inverse problems. These problems have rich applications in finance, hysteresis in smart materials, signal and image processing. Carmeliza has collaborated with a graduate student, a postdoctoral fellow, and Stanley Osher on these projects.

Olga Radko has been a VIGRE Assistant Professor at UCLA since the Fall of 2002. Her research interests are in the fields of Poisson geometry, symplectic geometry, and Hamiltonian dynamical systems. In particular, her joint with H. Bursztyn, (University of Toronto) involved a comparison of Morita equivalence of Poisson manifolds (an analog of the algebraic notion of Morita equivalence) with a more geometric notion of gauge equivalence of Poisson manifolds. More recently, in a joint work with D. Shlyakhtenko (UCLA), she has computed the Picard groups (which can be veiwed as groups of generalized automorphisms) for a certain generic class of Poisson structures on surfaces.

While at UCLA, Olga Radko has taught a variety of undergraduate courses, including Calculus, Linear Algebra, Honors Linear algebra, Differential Geometry and Game Theory.

Arthur Szlam received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale University in the Spring of 2006. His research interest is in Harmonic Analysis.

Chad Topaz is an applied mathematician whose research interest is spatiotemporal pattern formation. This interest has led him to work on problems in physics (fluid surface waves, thermal convection), chemistry (reaction-diffusion systems) and biology (animal swarming) using tools from dynamical systems, group theory, perturbation theory, PDE analysis, and numerical computing. His research results with Andrea Bertozzi (his VIGRE mentor) and with other collaborators have been published in Physical Review Letters, Physical Review E, the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, and Physica D.

Born in Chicago, 1976. Thomas Ward graduated with an B.S. in Chemical Engineering and minor in Applied Math (high honors and cum laude) from the University of Missouri - Rolla. He received his M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UCSB. His research interests include studying all aspects of fluid mechanics, in particular microscale fluid flow which ranges from blood flow in arteries to the flow of oil in porous rocks. Other topics of interest include dynamical system studies of fluid systems from mixing of highly viscous fluids to studying the dynamics of squeezed thin films. He currently teaches as an NSF-VIGRE adjunct professor in the Department of Mathematics and sometimes lectures in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA.

Will Wylie received his Ph.D. in 2006 from UC Santa Barbara under the direction of Guofang Wei. His research is in Riemannian geometry. More specifically his research has focused on Ricci curvature, which has many interesting connections to measure theory, PDEs, topology, and physics. Recently (in joint work with Peter Petersen) he has obtained new classification theorems for Ricci solitons.