Honoring Black History Month

Fern Hunt 

Dr. Fern Y. Hunt was born in New York City to Daphne and Thomas Hunt, and grew up in Manhattan, attending public schools and graduating from the Bronx High School of Science. Dr Hunt’s interest in science was sparked one Christmas when she, then nine years old, received the gift of a chemistry set. Her commitment to continue studying science was strengthened by the example and inspiration she received from her middle school teacher and science advisor Charles Wilson— the first African American scientist she ever met. In high school, Dr. Hunt's interests turned definitively to mathematics. She received a A.B. degree in Mathematics from Bryn Mawr College and went on to graduate studies at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, where she received a Ph.D. 

After spending some years in academia, Dr. Hunt joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). As a mathematician at NIST, her primary job was to conduct mathematics research that supported the ongoing research in information technology, biotechnology, and material science. She worked on a variety of projects including a larger scale program in computer graphic rendering of surfaces from reflectance measurements and more recently using aspects of graph theory to model communications in computer networks. Despite the variety, virtually all of these projects involve some aspect of Markov chains. In addition to applications, Dr. Hunt has studied aspects of discrete dynamical systems that are revealed by the numerical approximation of the system’s invariant measure. Recently, she has been studying random walks on graphs, particularly graphs that arise in the study of networks. A current interest is devising methods for selecting optimal sets for network communication that are based on the expected first time a random walker on the network graph visits the set. 

Dr. Hunt’s involvement with SIAM began a few years after leaving graduate school. She has participated in many national conferences and SIAM activities. Currently she serves on the organizing committee of the SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics (DM22) and was a member of the SIAM Nominating Committee. Dr. Hunt was a speaker at the minisymposium on Random Walks during the 2017 SIAM Annual Meeting, and organized a minisymposium on approximation of invariant measures years ago. Dr. Hunt has been an advocate for the diversity and inclusion of women and people of color in mathematics. She served as an organizer for the fifth SIAM Diversity Day, and since then has participated in a number of outreach activities such as Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month.

Ludovic Tangpi

Dr. Ludovic Tangpi is an assistant professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. His postdoctoral fellowship was in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Vienna in the group of W. Schachermayer, and his Ph.D. between Humboldt University Berlin and University of Konstanz with M. Kupper.

Growing up in Cameroon, Dr. Tangpi says he did not initially have an attraction to mathematics; he enjoyed reading fictional novels and discussing them with his sisters. In high school, a math teacher introduced him to mathematical reasoning as an entanglement of logical steps allowing you to reach a conclusion. “Mathematics questions became like interesting riddles, and I started to enjoy, and thirst for, the thrill I felt from solving them,” he says.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree at the University of Yaoundé 1 in Mathematics, he moved to Cape Town to attend the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), where he completed a master’s degree. “It was a great learning and personal experience during which I was exposed to a wide array of mathematical topics and applications; I also became aware of issues around gender and ethnic representation in sciences. It is at AIMS that I decided to become a researcher,” Dr. Tangpi says.

Dr. Tangpi’s research lies in applications of stochastic analysis in quantitative finance. During his Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellowship, he worked on developing techniques from stochastic analysis and functional analysis to understand financial modeling when the probabilistic distribution of the underlying assets is not known. This is an essential problem in risk management and for the stability of financial markets. More recently he has researched the asymptotic behavior of some interacting particle systems, studying two phenomenon called propagation of chaos and hypocoercivity of these particles. These properties have important applications, including using particle system methods for the numerical simulation of risk measures in finance.

Dr. Tangpi joined SIAM when he moved to the U.S. in 2018. “Given the type of research I am involved in, which is theoretical but motivated by industrial applications, becoming a SIAM member was quite an easy decision, and one for which I have been greatly rewarded,” he says. He has participated in several SIAM conferences as both a speaker and minisymposium organizer. “The insight I gain from discussions with SIAM conference participants could not have been gained otherwise. I must also acknowledge the work and effort of past and current SIAM Activity Group on Financial Mathematics and Engineering leaders for making financial engineering an integral part of SIAM, and one of the most thriving activity groups.”

In coming months and in collaboration with colleagues from Princeton and Cornell, Dr. Tangpi will be organizing a minisymposium at the SIAM Annual Meeting (happening July 2022) aimed at showcasing the work of talented underrepresented minority researchers in mathematics. He will also be teaching a course on financial risk management at the Gene Golub SIAM Summer School, planned to take place August 2022 at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) in L’Aquila, Italy.

Talea Mayo

Dr. Talea Mayo is a computational mathematician with expertise in the development and application of numerical models for coastal hazards. She specializes in hurricane storm surge modeling, including the investigation of climate change impacts on coastal flood risk, and data assimilation methods for state and parameter estimation. Dr. Mayo is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Emory University, and was awarded the Early Career Research Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences Gulf Research Program, and the Early Career Faculty Innovator Award by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 2018 and 2019, respectively. 

Dr. Mayo grew up in Denver, Colorado, and earned a Presidential Scholarship to attend Grambling State University. She declared Criminal Justice as her major with the goal of becoming a lawyer, but when she learned she had already met the mathematics requirements due to high school Advanced Placement classes, she decided to take an upper-level mathematics course anyway. The course instructor encouraged her to change her major to mathematics. After her junior year, she participated in an undergraduate research program at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, which exposed her to computational mathematics. She enjoyed it and decided to apply to applied math graduate programs.

Dr. Mayo attended The University of Texas at Austin, where she worked with Clint Dawson on the storm surge model, ADCIRC. She studied statistical data assimilation and developed ensemble methods to reduce computational costs of simulation and parameter estimation. While there, she also learned of SIAM and joined the student chapter. She attended the SIAM Conference on Mathematical & Computational Issues in the Geosciences in 2011. She won a graduate student poster award, and finally felt she had found a community for applied mathematicians like herself. Dr. Mayo has remained a member of SIAM since then and has organized several Workshop Celebrating Diversity (WCD) conference sessions, and recently served on the WCD Committee as a member and chair. She is currently the News Liaison for the SIAM Activity Group on Geosciences. 

Dr. Mayo earned her Ph.D. in Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics in 2013, before joining the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University as a postdoctoral research associate. There she worked with Ning Lin on storm surge model applications, including hazard assessment for end of century climate conditions. Her interest in this vital and tangible application lead her to spend five more years in a civil engineering department before finding her way back to mathematics. Dr. Mayo moved to Emory in 2020, where she currently teaches numerical analysis courses and has continued to study mathematics for coastal hazards research. When she’s not on Zoom, you can find her entertaining her two daughters with her co-author, or running around Georgia in preparation for the Publix Atlanta Marathon. 

William Pack 

William Pack is a Senior Principal Systems Engineer for Raytheon Technologies supporting their Raytheon

Intelligence & Space business. Mr. Pack has over 20 years of Electro-Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) systems engineering experience and is a subject matter expert in the realm of EO/IR sensor performance analysis. His expertise in mathematical modeling and image processing has led to a Raytheon Innovation Award for his work “Analytic method for distortion correction of wide field-of-view, f-theta optics,” and a patent award for his work “Local Area Processing Using Packed Distribution Functions” (U.S. Patent #9008458). He has also held numerous leadership roles including Chief Engineer, Responsible Engineering Authority, and Section Manager.

Mr. Pack was a SIAM member as a student and then joined as a professional 10 years into his career; he has been a participating member ever since. “It is through my networking within SIAM that led to my appointments on the External Advisory Council for the Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Dallas and the SIAM Membership Committee – two positions which I currently hold,” he says. Mr. Pack holds a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics, both from the University of New Orleans.  
Mr. Pack is currently the Sensor Characterization Lead for Raytheon Technologies' F-35 Electro-Optical Distributed Aperture System (EO DAS) program. He is the Responsible Systems Engineer (RSE) for all aspects of sensor performance. This role includes modeling the performance of the wide field-of-view MidWave InfraRed (MWIR) sensors and validating the models through data collection and analysis; developing a suite of data reduction/analysis tools (MATLAB) for ingesting, conditioning, analyzing, and interpreting sensor test data for sell-off of sensor requirements; developing error budgets to inform various levels of sensor and special test equipment design; and writing documentation for all models, test analysis tools, and error budgets. He was also the RSE for the Spatial Resolution performance area for the second flight unit (NOAA-20) of the NASA Joint Polar Satellite System - Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (JPSS VIIRS) program.  

 

Mr. Pack started college interested in STEM, and floated around a bit as an underclassman, majoring in Biology and then Computer Science. After a couple semesters of Calculus, he became more interested in Mathematics and switched majors. The Engineering and Applied Science doctoral program at the University of New Orleans allowed him to pursue the equivalent of a master's degree in Applied Mathematics and then transition to research in Mechanical Engineering. During this time, he developed skills in mathematical modeling and numerical analysis as well as experience solving real world problems. After his second year in the program, he interviewed with Raytheon and was offered a job as a Systems Engineer in El Segundo, CA. He wrapped up his research, graduated with a master's in Applied Mathematics, and began his career with Raytheon in 2002.   

Learn more about Black mathematicians we spotlighted last year.  

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