About Me

Education

Ph.D., Applied Mathematics, UCLA,    September 2010 - June 2015  

B.S./M.S. (Joint Program), Applied Mathematics, UCLA,  

Academic Appointments

Assistant Professor, Michigan State University August 2016 - present, Department of Mathematics and CMSE

UC President’s Postdoctoral Scholar, UCSD July 2015 - July 2016,  Department of Mathematics

Awards

UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015-2016)  

Pacific Journal of Mathematics Dissertation Prize (2015)  

Dissertation Year Fellowship (2014-2015)  

NSF Graduate Fellowship (2011-2014)  

Eugene-Cota Robles Fellowship (2010-2011)  

NSF Research and Training Grant (RTG) Fellowship in Applied Mathematics (2010-2011)  

Sherwood Award (for excellence in undergraduate studies) (2010)  

Departmental Scholar at UCLA (2009-2010)  

Basil Gordon Prize ($1000) for Putnam exam (2008)

Research Interests

My research consists of developing methods involving optimization for classication (clustering) using a graphical framework. The goal is to partition the data sets efficiently and accurately into a predetermined number of clusters, with or without some prior knowledge of the classication of a small percentage of the nodes. The classication problem is essential to machine learning; it occurs in numerous applications, such as medical or genomics data, spam detection, face recognition, financial predictions, and is finding growing use in text mining studies.        

I have also formulated some algorithms for image processing. Processing images is also of critical importance since images and other sensing modes are crucial in procedures of a variety of fields such as medicine (i.e. MRI imaging) and engineering.