New faculty members for 2020

Thursday, Oct 01, 2020

New tenure track faculty since January 2020 include:

Keaton Hamm, assistant professor of mathematics – Hamm’s research interests include mathematics of data science, harmonic analysis, dimensionality reduction, subspace clustering, unsupervised learning, low-rank matrix approximations, sampling theory, signal processing, and radial basis function (RBF) approximation. He has authored or co-authored 13 articles published in peer-reviewed journals. He received B.S. degrees in Mathematics (with honors) and Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2010 and earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Texas A&M in 2015. He was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University from 2015-18 and worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the NSF TRIPODS (Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science) program at the University of Arizona from 2018 until coming to UTA this semester.

Pedro Maia, assistant professor of mathematics – Maia’s research interests include applied mathematics, mathematical biology, computational neuroscience, traumatic brain injuries, neurodegenerative diseases, data-driven methods, and network science. He has co-authored 17 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He received a B.S.in Applied Mathematics, with an emphasis in Biophysics, in 2007 and a M.S. in Applied Mathematics in 2009, both from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He earned a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2014 from the University of Washington in Seattle. From 2017-18 he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Radiology and the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. He was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Radiology at the University of California at San Francisco from 2018 until joining UTA this fall.

Dengdeng Yu, assistant professor of mathematics – Yu’s research interests include many facets of Data Science, including neuroimaging data analysis, high dimensional data analysis, functional data analysis, imaging genetics, causal inference, and quantile regression. He has co-authored eight articles published in peer-reviewed journals. He received a B.S. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Southeast University in 2007, an M.S. in Financial Mathematics from the University of Ulm in Germany in 2011, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Statistics from the University of Alberta in Canada in 2013 and 2017, respectively. He worked as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Alberta from 2011-17 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute. He will join UTA in Spring 2021.

New non-tenure rack faculty who have joined since January 2020:

Rachid Atmai, lecturer in mathematics – Atmai’s present research involves mathematical models of consciousness. He has experience teaching discrete mathematics, calculus 1-3, linear and college algebra, elementary probabilities and statistics, and differential equations, among other courses. He received a master’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2009 and earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of North Texas in 2015. He was a visiting scholar in the Department of Mathematics at Rutgers University in 2014 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic at the University of Vienna in Austria from 2015-17. He worked as an instructor of mathematics at Mt. San Jacinto College and MiraCosta College in California from 2017-20 and most recently was a lecturer at the University of California at San Diego before coming to UTA this semester.

Mahmoud Jawad, lecturer in mathematics – Jawad is teaching classes and coordinating labs in elementary statistical analysis, as well as teaching other courses. He has taught courses in elementary statistics, college algebra, precalculus, multivariate statistical analysis, statistical inference, and mathematical statistics. He worked as a graduate teaching assistant for various math courses at UTA from 2015-18. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1997, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2018, all from UTA. He worked as an adjunct lecturer at UTA and at Tarrant County College in 2018, and was a visiting lecturer at UTA in 2019.