Dear UCD4IDS members,

I hope this email finds you and your family well under the current extraordinary circumstances. Also, I hope that you are successfully finishing up the most unusual and difficult academic year.

Before entering our summer break, I would like to announce the following great news.
We successfully hired three fantastic postdocs under our NSF TRIPODS grant (with coordination with mathematics and statistics departments). We are so lucky since quite a number of our cohort TRIPODS institutes have difficulty in hiring their postdocs.

The following are our three postdocs who will start their respective positions in July although they may actually move to Davis in early September (except Abhishek who is already in Davis):

• Stefan Schonsheck (Math; jointly appointed as a Krener Assistant Professor):

  • PhD: Math, Rensselaer Polytechnique Institute, 2020
  • Adviser: Rongjie Lai
  • Research Interest: Computational differential geometry and shape processing, especially numerical methods for PDEs, nonconvex optimization, inverse problems, computer vision and machine learning on curved domains in 3D (and beyond) represented as meshes, point clouds and/or graphs
  • Mentor: Naoki Saito
  • Possible Projects: Geometric scattering on graphs, robust graph signal feature extraction, etc.

• Abhishek Roy (Stat; jointly appointed as a lecturer):

  • PhD: ECE, UC Davis, 2020
  • Advisers: Prasant Mohapatra (CS); Krishna Balasubramanian (Stat)
  • Research Interest: Nonconvex optimization for sequential decision making, non-Euclidean optimization, causal inference, machine learning
  • Mentors: Krishna Balasubramanian; Thomas Lee; Alex Aue
  • Possible Projects: Inference for stochastic optimization; minimax optimality of conditional independence testing, etc.

• Chao Wang (ECE/CS)

  • PhD: Math, The Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, 2018
  • Adviser: Raymond Chan
  • Experience: Postdoctoral Scholar, Medical Artificial Intelligence and Automation (MAIA) Laboratory, Univ. Texas Southwestern Medical Center & UT Dallas
  • Research Interest: Scientific computing, image processing, machine learning, numerical linear algebra, compressed sensing, convex/nonconvex optimization, with applications to biology, engineering and physics
  • Mentor: Chen-Nee Chuah; Nina Amenta
  • Possible Projects: Application of deep learning techniques to perform rapid/precise quantification of the brain pathologies in collaboration with the UCD Alzheimer Disease Center

So, please join me to welcome them!
Have a wonderful, productive, and safe summer break, everyone!

All the best,
Naoki