About
Letter from the Chair
Welcome to the Department of Mathematics at Southern Methodist University (SMU).
The Department offers B.A. and B.S. degrees in Mathematics with several specializations as well as M.S. and Ph.D. programs in Computational and Applied Mathematics. Furthermore, the Department plays a central role in the teaching of a large number of SMU undergraduates seeking STEM and business majors. Our faculty consists of 19 tenured or tenure track faculty and three senior lecturers, all fully committed to the highest quality of teaching. Some faculty have received teaching awards from student’s nominations; two of whom have received the highest teaching distinction with membership to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at SMU, which is an organization consisting of recipients of the Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor Award. One Department faculty member was the recipient of the 2018 SMU President’s Associates Outstanding Faculty Award. Another faculty member was recognized in 2021 as both a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and as an SMU Ford Fellow.
Research in the Department impacts a wide range of applied areas, from traditional fields such as fluids, optics, wave turbulence, numerical analysis and numerical linear algebra, to emerging fields including material science, neuroscience and data science. Our faculty regularly receive research grants from the NSF, DOE, NIH and DOD. We foster an active and interdisciplinary research environment with collaborations within SMU, universities at home and abroad, National Laboratories and premier local research facilities such as UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Senior math majors and graduate students are immersed in these research collaborations, including regular participation in summer internships at National Laboratories. A newly created cluster in machine learning led by math faculty and hosted by the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute (DCII), brings in new collaborations with professionals in finance and banking. In Fall 2019, we launched an NSF funded Research Training Group program (SMU-RTG), which fosters close research interaction between department faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and that will position our Department to become a leading program in applied and computational mathematics. All together, we excel at fomenting research, training and mentoring in a cohesive way.
Sincerely,
Professor and Chair