George Washington University SIAM Student Chapter Hosts Conference on Applied Mathematics

The George Washington University (GW) SIAM Student Chapter hosted its Spring 2023 Conference on Applied Mathematics on April 8. The conference united researchers from multiple universities in the Washington, D.C., area to present their work in applied and computational mathematics.

The GW SIAM Student Chapter was founded in 2014 to promote applied math and computational science at GW. The chapter sponsors a variety of talks, conferences, and social opportunities throughout the school year. The Conference on Applied Mathematics was previously an annual event for the GW SIAM Student Chapter, with three consecutive gatherings in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Although the COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately interrupted the conference’s regularity, the chapter reinstated the meeting in 2023. We hope to continue the tradition and once again restore it as a yearly event in the future.

The 2023 conference drew a diverse crowd of approximately 30 individuals, including professors, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates from institutions in the greater D.C. metro area. Attendees had the chance to learn about a wide range of topics in applied mathematics and connect and network with their contemporaries in the field.

The conference featured seven invited speakers (one professor, three postdocs, and three graduate students) from four different universities. Topics ranged from geometric analysis and inverse problems to computational methods in imaging science and large deviation theory in stochastic partial differential equations. The following is a list of speakers and the titles of their respective presentations:

• Chong Wang (Washington and Lee University): “Periodic Minimizer of a Ternary Nonlocal Isoperimetric Problem”
• Yanfang Liu (GW): “Deterministic-statistical Approach for an Inverse Acoustic Source Problem Using Multiple Frequency Limited Aperture Data”
• Madhu Gupta (George Mason University): “Nonlinear Reconstruction of Optical Parameters in Photoacoustic Tomography”
• Guillaume Bonnet (University of Maryland, College Park): “Virtual Element Method for Nondivergence Form Elliptic Equations”
• Mengzi Xie (University of Maryland, College Park): “The Smoluchowski-Kramers Approximation of Nonlinear Wave Equations with Variable Friction”
• Shuo Yan (University of Maryland, College Park): “Random Perturbations of Hamiltonian Systems”
• David Sayre (George Mason University): “An Optimal Control Framework for Neuromorphic Imaging.”

The engaging talks exposed attendees to cutting-edge research in a variety of areas within applied mathematics. Each talk lasted 25 minutes and was followed by a brief question-and-answer session that allowed the audience to converse with the speakers and pose additional inquiries about their work. “I was excited to have the opportunity to participate in this event and meet young researchers with diverse backgrounds,” Yi Nie of GW’s Department of Statistics said. “I learned a lot from the talks and will definitely attend the conference next year.”

The GW SIAM Student Chapter would like to thank SIAM and the Department of Mathematics at GW for their financial support. We look forward to hosting students from across the region again in 2024.