Curriculum Vita


I grew up outside of Granville, Ohio (near Columbus) and attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, where I graduated with honors in Applied Mathematics in 1991 (thesis advisor Hans Bremermann). After college, I took a break from an academic career, part spent making documentary films - "The Ride to Wounded Knee" (1992, post-production manager, assistant editor, sound editor), "29 and 7 Strong" (1995, all but narration) - and part spent as a VISTA volunteer building Self-Help homes in Okanagon County, Washington (grant writer, Spanish translator, real-estate purchaser, and ``documentarist"). I returned to Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I received a MSc in December of 1997, and PhD in June of 2001 under the guidance of James Burke. I was a NASA/GSFC Graduate Student Research Fellow from 1998 to 2001.  This experience grew into the central application of my PhD thesis on the theory and practice of numerical algorithms for adaptive optics to be used with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's replacement. After graduation I moved to the University of Göttingen in Germany to join Roland Potthast and Rainer Kress' group at the Institute for Numerical and Applied Mathematics. There I worked on inverse scattering theory and research cooperation with industry partners (July 2001 to April 2003). I was with the Mathematics Department at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver Canada as a PIMS Fellow under Jonathan Borwein and Adrian Lewis from December 2002 until August of 2004. I joined the University of Delaware in 2004 and earned promotion and tenure in 2009 before moving back to Göttingen. I am currently Professor for Continuous Optimization and Variational Analysis at the Universität Göttingen. I am a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung (DMV), Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR), Area Editor for the Open Journal of Mathematical Optimization, Associate Editor of Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications (JOTA),   ESAIM: Control, Optimization and Calculus of Variations (COCV),  SIAM Journal on Optimization, and Advances in Computational Mathematics.
 
Active Research Projects:

  1. Mathematics of atomic orbital tomography   with Stefan Mathias (CRC1456 TPB01)

  2. Stochastic computed tomography: theory and algorithms for single-shot X-FEL imaging   with Helmut Grubmueller (CRC1456 TPC02)

  3. Probabilistic Analysis and Stochastic Algorithms in Fixed Point Theory  with Anja Sturm (GRK2088 TPB5)

  4. Discrete Topological Optimization Techniques for the Statistical Analysis of Tree Structures  with Stephan Huckemann (GRK2088 TPA4)


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