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: