In honor of Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, SIAM is spotlighting mathematicians and statisticians throughout April. Dr. Fariba Fahroo is a Class of 2019 SIAM Fellow, former Chair and Vice Chair of the SIAM Control and Systems Theory Activity Group, and is a Program Officer at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Education and Awards
Dr. Fahroo received her Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University. Her advisor was Professor H.T. Banks. Dr. Fahroo also had an academic career as an assistant to full professorship at the Naval Postgraduate School in the Department of Applied Mathematics. In 2005, she joined the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) as a Program Manager for the computational math portfolio. From 2014 to 2018, she was detailed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a Program Manager in mathematics, and since 2018 she has continued her leadership in support of computational and applied mathematics back at AFOSR.
In 2010, Dr. Fahroo received the AIAA Mechanics and Flight Control Award for her contributions to the computational optimal control theory. She became an IEEE Fellow in 2018 and is a Class of 2019 SIAM Fellow. In 2020 she was selected as an AFRL Fellow in recognition of program and organizational leadership achievements in computational math and control and optimization theory.
With her peers at AFOSR and other funding agencies, she works to enhance the applied and computational math research by increasing funding, support, and engagement in application areas of national interest such as data science, space sciences, biology, and quantum systems.
Research Focus
Dr. Fahroo’s research interests have spanned two areas which can be considered as overlap of numerical analysis and optimal control theory: 1) design, control, and discretization of distributed parameter systems (DPS) modeled by partial differential equations; 2) discretization of constrained optimal control problems governed by nonlinear ordinary differential equations. She has worked on design of numerical algorithms for these controlled systems that preserve the structure and stability properties of the original system. Her work on pseudospectral approximations of optimal control problems in applications to spacecraft maneuvers and trajectory optimization has had a major impact on the field of astrodynamics and the methods have been implemented on actual flights. The best example of these flight implementations is the zero propellant maneuver of the International Space Station (ISS); this was documented in an article in SIAM News in 2007 and in a 2008 article in Space Daily.
These days, Dr. Fahroo can be found supporting projects in applied and computational math that are aligned with the AFOSR’s mission, which is to support basic research in modeling, simulation, and design of complex systems and operations relevant to the Department of the Air Force. For an applied mathematician, these systems are fertile ground for exploring different areas of applied mathematics – from computational science and data science to optimization and control theory – to handle the challenges in the high dimensional, multi-scale, uncertain, and highly nonlinear nature of these problems. She has supported single investigator projects, and large-scale funding in Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURIs) in areas such as uncertainty quantification, mean-field games, quantum many body system, and physics-informed machine learning. She is always learning from her colleagues and researchers from other fields, and truly believes that applied and computational math research is relevant to all research in engineering and science.
Thank you, Dr. Fahroo, for your contributions to SIAM and for your leadership in applied mathematics!