Andrea Bertozzi, Principal Investigator
This Research Training Group supports undergraduates and beginning graduate students doing research in applied differential equations and scientific computing. The group is a consortium of students from UCLA, Harvey Mudd College and from additional universities. This web page gives an overview and research results for the REU portion of the program.
This program is run with the philosophy that there a number of ways to effectively involve undergraduates in research that gives them a meaningful experience beyond the classroom. Being at a large research university like UCLA allows for many modalities of interaction. Bringing students from four year colleges to UCLA allows them to have an experience working alongside PhD students and postdocs that they would not obtain in their college environment. In some cases, we place individual students in regular research groups where they can contribute a valuable role that is suitable for their level of experience yet contributes ultimately to part of a research paper. In other instances, we have formed small focus groups with a single faculty mentor working together with a small team of undergraduates. The latter type of group is modelled somewhat on the IPAM RIPS program but where the research projects are suggested by UCLA faculty members rather than by corporations. Finally, we have benefitted from interdisciplinary interactions through the Applied Mathematics Laboratory which bring together students, postdocs, and faculty in engineering and science to work on problems where mathematics can make a significant impact. The possibility of having students work on hands-on experiments provides a larger array of research opportunities suitable for students at the undergraduate level.
In addition to providing a valuable research experience for undergraduates, we try to heavily involve young faculty, postdocs, and advanced PhD students in the mentoring process, while maintaining oversight by senior faculty. These interactions provides the REU students with a viewport into the steps needed to develop a research career. Moreover, it provides invaluable mentoring experience for our junior researchers, often enabling them to advance their careers through broader access to tenure track positions and through additional research publications and products brought about by projects involving the undergraduate researchers.
While NSF RTG support is crucial for funding the undergraduates, to maintain a program of this size and scope, we are indebted to support from regular research grants through a number of agencies, including NSF, ARO, ONR, DOE, NIH, other DoD support, and some industrial partners. The large majority of support for faculty mentors and PhD students assisting with this program comes from these regular research grants.
What Good Is Undergraduate Research, Anyway? , The Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 17, 2007.
List of Undergraduate Participants, Summer 2006
List of Undergraduate Participants, Summer 2007
List of Undergraduate Participants, Summer 2008
Jason Reich, Xiaobin Niu, Young-Ju Lee, Russel Caflisch, and Christian Ratsch, Lateral and Vertical Segregation in Thin Alloy Films, in preparation.
Thomas Ward and Asher Metchik, Viscous fluid mixing in a tilted tank by periodic shear, Chemical Engineering Science, 62 (22), 6274-6284.
James H. von Brecht, Seshadri R. Thiruvenkadam, and Tony F. Chan, Occlusion tracking with Logic Models , IASTED Conference on Signal and Image Processing 2007
Y. Landa, D. Galkowski, Y. R. Huang, A. Joshi, C. Lee, K. K. Leung, G. Mall a, J. Treanor, V. Voroninski, A. L. Bertozzi, and R. Tsai, Robotic path planning and visibility with limited sensor data, in the proceedings of the 2007 American Control Conference.
Kevin K. Leung, Chung H. Hsieh, Yuan R. Huang, Abhijeet Joshi, Vlad Voroninski, and Andrea L. Bertozzi, A second generation micro-vehicle testbed for cooperative control and sensing strategies, in the proceedings of the 2007 American Control Conference.
Chad M. Topaz, Andrew J. Bernoff, Sheldon Logan, and Wyatt Toolson, A model for rolling swarms of locusts European Physical Journal, vol. 157, pages 93-109, 2008.
Carmeliza Navasca, Ani Asatryan, Vatche Attarian, Abhijeet Joshi, Vlad Voroninski, Meghdi Aboulian, and Krystle McBride Implementations of control laws for motion camouflage in a pursuit-evasion system , Proceedings of the 23rd IFIP Conference on System Modeling and Optimization, Krakow, Poland 2007.