Amundson Lecture Series
About Neal Amundson
Dr. Amundson is recognized as an exceptionally prolific, innovative and influential ChE researcher. His contributions include modeling and analysis of chemical reactors, separation systems, polymerization, and coal combustion. He has had a profound, pioneering impact on the education of chemical engineers, changing the teaching of the field from a qualitative, descriptive approach to precise scientific methodologies.
A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Neal R. Amundson received a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering, a master's degree in chemical engineering and a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Minnesota. Professor Amundson remained at the University of Minnesota, teaching both chemical engineering and mathematics. In 1949 he became head of the department of chemical engineering and continued for the next 25 years. Dr. Amundson joined UH Chemical Engineering Department in 1977 and also served as UH Provost from 1987 to 1989.
Neal R. Amundson is an influential chemical engineer and mathematician, who has helped shape future outlooks in the field of chemical engineering. His legacy will live on in the minds and hearts of all those who knew him, as well as serve as inspiration for those to come.
Amundson Lecture Series
About the Speaker: Martin Feinberg is the Richard Morrow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Mathematics at the Ohio State University. Building on earlier work with F.J. M Horn and Roy Jackson (formerly of the University of Houston), Feinberg and his students went on to prove penetrating and sometimes surprising theorems that led to chemical reaction network theory, a body of work that connects reaction network structure to qualitative properties of the corresponding differential equations. He has also done fundamental work on the mathematics of chemical processing and on foundations of classical thermodynamics. Before moving to Ohio State, Feinberg was a professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Rochester. He was educated at Cooper Union (B.Ch.E.), at Purdue University (M.S.), and at Princeton University (Ph.D.).
About the Speaker: Professor Joseph is world renowned for his work on Fluid Flows, and has been awarded membership in the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He hols 10 patents, and has published 6 books and 350 research articles.
About the Speaker: Professor Marsden’s extensive research includes work in Geometric Mechanics, with applications to Rigid Body Systems, Fluid Mechanics, Elasticity Theory, Plasma Physics, as well as General Field Theory. His work in Dynamical Systems and Control Theory emphasizes mechanical systems and symmetry. He is one of the founders of Reduction Theory in such systems, an area which is much studied and continues to be active. Marsden has won many awards for his research, including Election of the Royal Society and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Von Neumann Prize, SIAM’s highest honor. Marsden is an exceptional expositor, who has written numerous mathematics books at all levels.
About the Speaker: The 2008 Information Theory Society Paper Award recipient, Emmanuel Candes, received his B.Sc. degree from the Ecole Polytechnique (France) in 1993, and Ph.D. degree in Statistics from Stanford University in 1998. He was a Roland and Maxine Linde Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at Caltech. Prior to joining Caltech, he was an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, 1998—2000. His research interests are in computational harmonic analysis, multiscale analysis, approximation theory, statistical estimation and detection with applications to the imaging sciences, signal processing, scientific computing, inverse problems, as well as, theoretical computer science, mathematical optimization, and information theory.
About the Speaker: Professor Younes is affiliated with the Center for Imaging Science and the Institute of Computational medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include statistical properties of Markov random fields, image analysis, deformation analysis-shape recognition, and computational anatomy.
About the Speaker: Professor Arnolds research concerns numerical analysis, partial differential equations, mechanics and the interplay between these fields. He served as director of the IMA from 2001—2008, and president of SIAM in 2009 and 2010. He also was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge.
About the Speaker: Professor Olivier Pironneau’s research interests include Fluid Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Optimal Design, Mathematical Finance, Numerical Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. He is the author of 8 books and more than 300 papers and the Advisor of more than thirty Ph.D. students. He is a member of French Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Marcel Dassault Prize by the French Academy of Sciences in 2000. He is also the recipient of the Blaise Pascal Prize of the Academy of Sciences (1983), the Legion d’Honneur (2009), and is an Associate member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His group has developed the software named Free FEM which is used by researchers worldwide for computation.
About the Speaker: Andrea Bertozzi is an applied mathematician with expertise in nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid dynamics. She also works in the areas of geometric methods for image processing, crime modeling and analysis, and swarming/cooperative dynamics. Bertozzi completed all her degrees in Mathematics at Princeton. She was an L. E. Dickson Instructor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 1991-1995. She was the Maria Geoppert-Mayer Distinguished Scholar at Argonne National Laboratory from 1995-6. She was on the faculty at Duke University from 1995-2004 first as Associate Professor of Mathematics and then as Professor of Mathematics and Physics. She has served as the Director of the Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems while at Duke. Bertozzi moved to UCLA in 2003 as a Professor of Mathematics. Since 2005 she has served as Director of Applied Mathematics, overseeing the graduate and undergraduate research training programs at UCLA. In 2012 she was appointed the Betsy Wood Knapp Chair for Innovation and Creativity. Bertozzi's honors include the Sloan Research Fellowship in 1995, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1996, SIAM's Kovalevsky Prize in 2009, and a Simons Math + X Investigator award in 2017. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and to the Fellows of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2010. She became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013 and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. She won a SIAM outstanding paper prize in 2014 with Arjuna Flenner, for her work on geometric graph-based algorithms for machine learning. Bertozzi is a Thomson-Reuters `highly cited' Researcher in mathematics for both 2015 and 2016, one of about 100 worldwide in her field.
About the Speaker: Roman Vershynin is a Professor of Mathematics working at the University of California, Irvine. His primary area of expertise is high dimensional probability. He is interested in random geometric structures that appear across mathematics and data sciences, in particular in random matrix theory, geometric functional analysis, convex and discrete geometry, geometric combinatorics, high dimensional statistics, information theory, learning theory, signal processing, numerical analysis, and network science.
About the Speaker: Howard A. Stone is the Neil A. Omenn '68 University Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He also holds the Donald R. Dixon '69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professorship and served as Department Chair from 2014 to 2023. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from UC Davis (1982) and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Caltech (1988), where he studied under L. Gary Leal. After a postdoctoral year at Cambridge University, he spent two decades on the faculty at Harvard University, where he became the Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics, before joining Princeton in 2009. His academic lineage traces through Andreas Acrivos to Neal Amundson, connecting him directly to the legacy this lecture series honors.
A world leader in fluid dynamics, Stone's research bridges engineering, chemistry, physics, and biology, addressing fundamental problems in microfluidics, multiphase flows, physicochemical hydrodynamics, and biological systems. His extraordinary contributions have been recognized through election to the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Society (Foreign Member). He was the inaugural recipient of the G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Dynamics (2008) and received the APS Fluid Dynamics Prize (2016). Equally dedicated to teaching, Stone has earned Harvard's highest teaching honors and continues this commitment to excellence at Princeton.