October 5, 2017
Award Date: October 05, 2017

The University of California, Santa Barbara Mathematics Department is pleased to introduce three new faculty members: Karel Casteels, Davit Harutyunyan, and Hanming Zhou.  See the full article for more about these new professors.



Karel Casteels

Dr. Karel Casteels received his PhD in 2010 from Simon Fraser University in Canada under the supervision of Jason Bell. He obtained a Visiting Assistant Professorship at UCSB where he researched the connections between quantum matrices and combinatorics. He held a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the University of Kent, United Kingdom from 2013-2015 where he expanded his work to examining other quantum algebras. Since 2015, he has been a Lecturer at UCSB, holding a cross-appointment between the Department of Mathematics and the College of Creative Studies. During the summers, he continues his quantum algebra work with undergraduate students through the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at UCSB.

 

 

Davit Harutyunyan

Prof. Davit Harutyunyan received his Ph.D. in 2012 from the University of Bonn, under the supervision of Prof. Stefan Müller. Prior to joining UCSB, Dr. Harutyunyan held postdoctoral positions at Temple University, at the University of Utah, and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Dr. Harutyunyan's research interests are very diverse, ranging from the Calculus of Variations, to Continuum Mechanics, Homogenization, Composite Materials, Metamaterials, Materials Science and Micromagnetics, among other topics.
As a high school student, Dr. Harutyunyan already received national recognition when he was awarded the Republic of Armenia Government House Medal in the year 2000. He received several Bronze and Silver medals in the International Mathematical Olympiads (IMO), and received a gold medal in the IMO in 2005. 
That same year, Dr. Harutyunyan was awarded the Best Student of Yerevan State University Award. More recently, he has received the Emil Artin Junior Prize in Mathematics. Established in 2001, this prize is presented every year to a former student of an Armenian university, who is under the age of thirty-five, for outstanding contributions in algebra, geometry, topology, and number theory, the fields in which Emil Artin made major contributions. 
 
 

Hanming Zhou

Prof. Hanming Zhou received his PhD in 2015 from University of Washington, under the direction of Gunther Uhlmann. Prior to coming to UCSB, Dr. Zhou was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Dr. Zhou's research focuses on the mathematical analysis of inverse problems and their connections with concrete applications, often motivated by problems arising in medical imaging, geophysics, classical and quantum mechanics, and astronomy, among other areas. His work is at the interface of several disciplines including partial differential equations (PDEs), differential geometry, harmonic analysis and mathematical physics and has become an important area of research due in part to its potential applications