Welcome to the Department: Assistant Professor Eduardo Corona

This fall, the Applied Mathematics Department is welcoming Assistant Professor Eduardo Corona to the faculty! Before joining APPM, Dr. Corona was an Assistant Professor at New York Institute of Technology’s Mathematics Department. When asked about the draw to APPM, Dr. Corona noted the calibre of APPM’s faculty, saying: “Ever since my PhD work at Courant on fast direct solvers for integral equations, I have followed with great interest the research of esteemed colleagues currently at APPM Boulder, like Profs Adrianna Gillman and Greg Beylkin as well as former members like Prof. Gunnar Martinsson.” Continuing on, Dr. Corona explained the opportunities at CU Boulder as a whole are enticing: “I believe CU Boulder to be exceptionally fertile soil for the kind of interdisciplinary and impactful research I aim to develop with our fast algorithms research group.”

Dr. Corona has clear research goals coming into the Department:

“My main research agenda at the moment is centered around building fast algorithmic frameworks for scientific computing. What does this mean? When one looks at problems in physics simulation or in scientific data compression, one can find mathematical structures and patterns that are common to a large class of examples across disciplines. Fast, ‘black-box’ frameworks can then be devised by exploiting this very structure. 

To give a concrete example, our recent work in viscous fluid suspensions was motivated by problems in porous media flows, cell mechanics, microscopic swimmers such as colonies of bacteria or algae, ‘soft material’ design, drug delivery and biomedical devices. In all of these areas, simple interactions between tiny particles can give rise to fascinating macroscopic patterns.”

Interdisciplinary work is an important priority to Dr. Corona and his work as a whole: “Due to the very nature of my group's agenda, I aim to establish fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations, and to mentor and champion the work of a diverse group of students, bringing their passion and expertise across mathematical disciplines.”

Dr. Corona, in collaboration with Professor Shravan Veerapaneni at the University of Michigan, has also worked on 2 different projects for the United States Army under Automotive Research Center grants. The first project involved simulations of granular terrain that aid in vehicle design and logistics. Dr. Corona explained that “we applied our expertise in fast algorithms and parallel computing to accelerate optimization-based simulation of granular terrain.”

The second project involves novel methods for scientific data compression:

“In our current project, we are using tensor compression techniques to reduce big data-sets involved in soil-vehicle simulation. By leveraging low rank structure in the data, we can go from a 1 terabyte (TB ) data set (barely fits in your computer) to one occupying 1 gigabyte or even 100 or 10 megabytes (you have probably sent email attachments that are this big).”

Applied Mathematics welcomes Assistant Professor Corona to the Department and is looking forward to seeing the impact he can make in the community!