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
List of Undergraduate Participants, Summer 2009
Preprint
``Experimental Validation of Environmental Boundary Tracking with On-Board Sensors'', by Abhijeet Joshi, Trevor Ashley, Yuan R. Huang, and Andrea L. Bertozzi, accepted in the 2009 American Control Conference.
J.M. Reich, X.B. Niu, Y.-J., R.E. Caflisch, and C. Ratsch, Lateral alloy segregation in thin heteroepitaxial films, Phys. Rev. B 79, 073405 (2009).
Thomas Ward and Asher Metchik, Viscous fluid mixing in a tilted tank by periodic shear,
Chemical Engineering Science, 62 (22), 6274-6284, 2007.
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.
Here is a recent article on undergraduate research. It is based
on studies that were largely done at four year colleges, rather
than at research universities.
Harvey Mudd student projects in this program
Selected reports, papers, presentations and videos
2008 REU projects
2007 REU projects
2006 REU projects