People

Current Collaborators:  Kerry Bloom and his group, UNC Biology; Boyce Griffith and his group, UNC Applied Mathematics; Aaron Barrett, College of Charleston; Ronit Freeman and her group, UNC Applied Physical Sciences; Rich Superfine and his group, UNC Applied Physical Sciences; David Hill and his group, UNC Biomedical Engineering and Marsico Lung Institute

Current Ph.D. student: Leyi Zhang, primary adviser Karin Leiderman-Gregg

Recent Ph.D. Students:

  • Ben Walker, Methods for detecting dynamic and multiscale structure and self-organization of the yeast genome, from experimental and simulated data, co-adviser K. Newhall (UNC), May 2021, Visiting Assistant Professor, Mathematics, UC-Irvine
  • Anne Talkington, Physiologically based, pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling and experiments of drug delivery to tumors based on an anti-PEG, bi-specific antibody strategy, co-adviser Sam Lai (UNC), May 2021, postdoc at UVA
  • Andrew Ford, Molecular dynamics modeling of heterogeneous structure and rheology of human lung mucus, co-advisers R. Freeman (UNC), X. Cao (Xiamen University), May 2022, software developer for Epic Systems, Verona, WI
  • Jason Pearson, A mechanistic explanation of ballistic rises in nasal infections of the SARS-CoV-2 variants, August 2022, software developer for Simulations Plus
  • Kate Daftari, Active Particle Dispersion Systems, primary adviser K. Newhall (UNC), May 2023, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Baltimore, MD
  • John (Neall) Caughman, Data analysis and material property inferences from passive microbead rheology experiments in heterogeneous biological systems, co-adviser M. Lysy (U. Waterloo), August 2023, on the job market
  • Cole Gruninger, Analytical and Computational Extensions of IBAMR, June 2025, co-advisor Boyce Griffith, assistant professor of Mathematics, Fordham University
  • Karen Medlin, Classifier strategies for imbalanced datasets, June 2025, co-advisors Sven Leyffer and Krishnan Ragavan, Argonne National Lab, Software Engineer at RedHat, Inc.
  • Sam Heroy (2018) co-advised by Peter Mucha, postdoc at U. Oxford and University College, London, 2018-2022, currently at the Federal Reserve, Charlotte office
  • Aaron Barrett (2019) co-advised by Boyce Griffith, currently assistant professor of mathematics, College of Charleston
  • Yunyan He (2020) currently at The MathWorks Inc., Torrance, CA
  • Fuhui Fang (2020) co-advised by Boyce Griffith, currently at Microsoft, Inc.

Recent Postdocs:

  • Xuezheng Cao currently Professor of Physics, Xiamen University
  • Saad Qadeer  co-mentored by Boyce Griffith, currently staff member at Pacific Northwest Laboratory
  • Feifei Xu — since April 2017, Google, Inc.
  • Jia Zhao — Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of Alabama
  • Jay Newby — Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of Alberta
  • Kelsey Gasior — Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Notre Dame University