The Department of Mathematics and Statistics welcomed three new assistant professors and three new Assistant Professors of Instruction in August of 2025.
Ladan Avazpour has taken a position as Assistant Professor of Instruction. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from IAU in 2015. Prior to joining °®¶¹´«Ã½, she worked at Brown University as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She joined °®¶¹´«Ã½ as a postdoctoral scholar in 2021 and later served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Instruction from 2022 to 2025. Her new title recognizes her success in teaching large lecture lower-division and calculus courses.
Tomas Berggren is a new Assistant Professor. Professor Berggren received his Ph.D. from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in 2020 for his work On Determinantal Point Processes and Random Tilings with Doubly Periodic Weights under the direction of Maurice Duits. He comes to °®¶¹´«Ã½ following postdoctoral positions at the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and most recently KTH. His research focus is on asymptotic properties of probabilistic models in mathematical statistical mechanics, with the main focus on dimer models.
Lina Fajardo Gomez has taken a position as Assistant Professor of Instruction. She received her Ph.D. from the University of South °®¶¹´«Ã½ in 2022. Upon graduation she took a Visiting Assistant Professor of Instruction position in our department. Her new title recognizes her success in teaching calculus and college algebra courses.
Christopher Felder is a new Assistant Professor. Professor Felder received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2022 for his work on Some Problems in Reproducing Kernel Space under the direction of John E. McCarthy. Before joining °®¶¹´«Ã½, was a Zorn Postdoctoral Fellow at University Indiana Bloomington. He has (co)authored 10 articles. His research focus is on operator theory and complex analysis.
Jiaqi Gu is a new Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2022 for his work Statistical Learning by Embedding Data into Computational Graphs under the direction of Philip L.H. Yu and Prof. Guosheng Yin. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University before joining °®¶¹´«Ã½. He has (co)authored 17 articles ranging across statistical genetics, high-dimensional statistical inference with geometric information, quantitative analysis of survival and public health data, and preference learning and network data modeling. His current research topics includes causal inference of biomedical data, post-selection inference of graphical models and efficient computational algorithm development.
Marie Meyer is a new Assistant Professor of Instruction. Professor Meyer received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2018 for her work on Polytopes Associated to Graph Laplacians under the direction of John Shareshian. She comes to °®¶¹´«Ã½ from Lewis University, where she was an Associate Professor. Her current research interests include algebraic combinatorics, impartial combinatorial games, and scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) topics such as active learning, alternative assessment, and student mindsets in college math courses.