By Bruce Wade
The SIAM Texas-Louisiana (TX-LA) Section held its 6th Annual Meeting (TXLA23) in Lafayette, La., from November 3-5, 2023. The Department of Mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette) hosted the three-day conference, which attracted more than 350 attendees — including 249 speakers and 165 undergraduate and graduate students. This record-breaking number of participants demonstrates the tremendous growth of the SIAM TX-LA Section and the continued success of UL Lafayette’s Department of Mathematics.
The TXLA23 program consisted of a career panel, a mentoring workshop, a poster session, 34 unique minisymposia, and four plenary lectures; SIAM provided travel support for the plenary speakers and 20 travel awards for students. Presenters reported on cutting-edge methodologies and computational algorithms in research areas such as applied algebra, algebraic geometry, biomathematics, computational mathematics, data science, and various application areas in science and engineering.
The four plenary lecturers shared novel research in a variety of fields. Susanne Brenner (Louisiana State University) and Maxim Olshanskii (University of Houston) addressed finite element methods in two different contexts: for problems with rough coefficients and for the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) on surfaces. Marta D’Elia (Pasteur Labs) discussed scientific machine learning in industrial pipelines, and Robert Kirby (Baylor University) spoke about high-level software for numerical PDEs.
The 45-minute career panel, which took place on the first day of the conference, featured panelists Henry Schenck (Auburn University), Matthias Maier (Texas A&M University), and Phillip Whitman (UL Lafayette). The speakers outlined their respective employment trajectories, offer-ed nuanced advice based on their own experiences, answered questions from the audience, and stimulated interesting discussions with attendees.
53 presenters participated in the poster session at TXLA23, including the following six Outstanding Student Poster winners:
- 1st place: Jaryd Domine (Southern Methodist University) for “Waves in Black Hole Geometries: An Energy-based Discontinuous Galerkin Method”
- 2nd place: Kendall Gibson (Tulane University) for “Modeling the Elastohydrodynamics of Swimming Choanoflagellates”
- 3rd place: Daniela Florez Pineda (Tulane University) for “Assessing the Risk of Dengue Outbreaks Across Continental Biomes in Brazil”
- Tie for 4th place: Kyle Earp (Tarleton State University) for “Bayesian Methods to Infer Parameters for ODE Models of Disease Spread”
- Tie for 4th place: Sang-Eun Lee (Tulane University) for “Collective Dynam-ics of Self-avoidant, Secreting Particles”
- Tie for 4th place: David Pecoraro (Texas A&M University) for “Approximation of the Compressible Euler Equations in the Low Mach Limit.”
The TXLA23 Organizing Committee consisted of Azmy Ackleh, Hayriye Gulbudak, Amy Veprauskas, Bruce Wade (chair), Xiang-Sheng Wang, and Yangwen Zhang (all from UL Lafayette), as well as the SIAM TX-LA Section officers: President Andrea Bonito (Texas A&M University), vice president Shawn Walker (Louisiana State University), secretary Jesse Chan (Rice University), and treasurer Natasha Sharma (University of Texas at El Paso).
TXLA23 received positive feedback from attendees for its vibrant scientific program and strong student presence. We hope that its success will carry over to next year’s event, which will take place at Baylor University in late 2024.
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Bruce Wade is the C.B.I.T. TC/LEQSF Regents Professor of Mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a specialization in computational math. Wade completed a postdoctoral appointment at Cornell University and is an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. |