Melvin Leok’s Professional Blog

I have accepted a tenured associate professorship in Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, which will commence on July 1, 2009. The computational geometric mechanics group will be relocating to San Diego, and it will be affiliated with the Center for Computational Mathematics, the Program in Computational Science, Mathematics, and Engineering, and the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics.

As part of Purdue’s annual presidential review of the College of Science, the department of mathematics has commissioned a short video vignette where I describe my research in a broadly accessible fashion. This is available as a streaming video.

I have been selected in an internal competition as one of Purdue University’s two nominees in 2009 for the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. Every year, the Packard Foundation invites the presidents of 50 universities to nominate two professors each from their institutions. An advisory panel of distinguished scientists and engineers then selects 20 Fellows to receive individual awards of $875,000, payable over five consecutive years.

I will be on leave from Purdue University from April 2009 to mid June 2009 to visit the California Institute of Technology as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems.

Ms. Tatiana Shingel, a graduate student in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, under the research direction of Prof. Arieh Iserles, has accepted a three-year appointment as a research assistant professor of mathematics at Purdue University.

Her appointment will commence in August of 2009, and she will be affiliated with the Computational Geometric Mechanics at Purdue group. Her research expertise is in global constructive approximation and interpolation on Lie groups.

Tomoki Ohsawa, a graduate student from the University of Michigan, will be visiting the Computational Geometric Mechanics at Purdue group from mid February to early March.

His research interests are in Dirac structures and mechanics, as well as nonholonomic Hamilton-Jacobi theory.

I will be visiting the Boston and Baltimore area in the next few weeks, and giving seminars at MIT and Johns Hopkins respectively. These will be colloquium style presentations surveying the field of computational geometric mechanics, as well as highlighting some exciting new research directions.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mathematics
Physical Mathematics Seminar
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
2:30pm-3:30pm, Room 2-105
Website

Johns Hopkins University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics
Applied Mathematics and Statistics Seminar
Thursday, February 12, 2009
4:00pm-5:00pm, 304 Whitehead Hall
Website

Ms. Jingjing Zhang, a PhD candidate at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Science, in Beijing is joining our computational geometric mechanics group starting February 12, 2009, until December 2009.

Her stay at Purdue is funded by a fellowship from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, where she is advised by Prof. Jialin Hong. Her research interests include structure-preserving numerical integrators for multisymplectic field theories, and for stochastic systems.

For candidates interested in joining the Computational Geometric Mechanics @ Purdue group, research positions for postdoctoral scholars and graduate students in the broad area of geometric numerical methods in geometric mechanics and control remain available. Please contact Prof. Melvin Leok for further details.

My first PhD student, Taeyoung Lee, successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled, “Computational Geometric Mechanics and Control of Rigid Bodies,” on May 8, 2008.

He was jointly co-advised by Prof. N. Harris McClamroch. The other members of the doctoral committee were Prof. Anthony Bloch, Prof. Jessy Grizzle, and Prof. Daniel Scheeres.

Amongst Taeyoung’s many honors, he recently received the Distinguished Achievement Award and the Ivor K. McIvor Award (outstanding research in applied mechanics) from the College of Engineering, University of Michigan.

Taeyoung will be starting an assistant professorship in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology in Fall of 2008.

Diana Sosa Martín, who recently received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of La Laguna in Spain, will be joining Purdue University as a visiting assistant professor for the 2008/2009 academic year. Her research interests include geometric mechanics on Lie groupoids and algebroids.

Tomoki Ohsawa, a mathematics graduate student at the University of Michigan, will be visiting the group during the summer of 2008. His advisor at Michigan is Prof. Anthony Bloch.

Charles Roldan, an undergraduate mathematics major and physics minor, will be returning in his second summer as a NSF REU student.

Wooi-Chen Ng, an undergraduate computer science major, will be joining the group as a summer undergraduate research assistant.

For candidates interested in joining the Computational Geometric Mechanics @ Purdue group, research positions for postdoctoral scholars and graduate students in the broad area of geometric numerical methods in geometric mechanics and control remain available. Please contact Prof. Melvin Leok for further details.