- Admissions
- Awards & Fellowships
- Courses
- Programs
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- Applied & Interdisciplinary Mathematics Master's Degree
- Marjorie Lee Browne MS to PhD Bridge Program
- Mathematics Master's Degrees
- Quantitative Finance & Risk Management Master's Program
- Dual Degree MS - Current U-M Graduate Students Only
- Applied & Interdisciplinary Mathematics Ph.D.
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- Mission and History
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Program Requirements
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Resources for Faculty and AIM Grads
- Mathematics Ph.D.
- Recent Ph.D. Recipients
- Student Handbook - AIM & Math
- Students On the Job Market - AIM & Math
- Student Spotlight - AIM & Math
- Thesis Defense Schedule
Rationale and Mission
The AIM Program is designed to be attractive to students who enjoy the interaction of mathematics with science, engineering or other quantitative disciplines. An AIM student does not necessarily have an undergraduate degree in mathematics, but can also be admitted with an undergraduate degree in a relevant application area.
The important aspect that all AIM students share regardless of undergraduate background is that they are comfortable with mathematical concepts and have a strong interest in applying them to some partner discipline (see the list of former students below for a representative but not at all exhaustive sample of potential partner disciplines). Students completing a degree in the AIM Program will be suitably trained for a research career in a world where mathematical sophistication is increasingly important in all areas of application.
Full details of the academic structure of the AIM Program are presented elsewhere on this site. At this time we wish to emphasize one novel aspect of the essential interdisciplinary nature of the program: every AIM Ph.D. student has not just one faculty advisor, but two co-advisors. One co-advisor can be any faculty member of the Department of Mathematics, and the other --- representing the student's chosen partner discipline --- can be chosen from any department other than mathematics at the University of Michigan. Some AIM students work so closely with their partner discipline co-advisor that they spend much of their time on thesis research outside of the Department of Mathematics. Others work more closely with their Mathematics co-advisor. The AIM Program is sufficiently flexible to support a wide range of working relationships among graduate students and their two co-advisors. The co-advisor system also ensures that AIM Ph.D. students are prepared for subsequent employment in two different kinds of academic departments, as well as in industry.
Although administered from the Department of Mathematics, AIM differs significantly from the Mathematics graduate program in the requirements for the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, which are specially designed to account for more varied backgrounds of incoming graduate students and to showcase the essential interdisciplinary nature of the AIM Program. Details of these requirements can be found by following the links on the left.
AIM Program History
By the 1990's it became clear that the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan would benefit from an infusion of faculty working in interdisciplinary science, and due to the vision of former department chair D. Lewis an Interdisciplinary Initiative was formulated that produced a number of faculty positions devoted to this new area. The period 1997--1999 saw the development, institutional approval, and official accreditation of the AIM Graduate Program by a committee consisting of C. R. Doering and J. Sneyd under the leadership of then department chair B. A. Taylor. The first class of AIM graduate students was admitted in Fall of 2000 and now the program operates at an approximate equilibrium of about 30 Ph.D. students distributed over 5 classes. The M.S. program is smaller, and caters to professionals wanting to continue their education as well as students from undergraduate institutions. The Marjorie Lee Browne Scholars Program was added as an option for the AIM M.S. program in 2010.
The Directors of the AIM Program have been: C. R. Doering (1999 -- 2003), P. Smereka (2003--2008), P. D. Miller (2008--2012), R. Vershynin (2013--2014), S. Esedoglu (2014--2015), and S. Alben (2015--). It is fair to say that the Interdisciplinary Initiative has taken root at the University of Michigan. Indeed, in 2007 the applied mathematics faculty at the University of Michigan was ranked #1 in the country in the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index calculated by Academic Analytics as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This index included the contributions of both mathematics faculty and faculty from other departments, all of which are available to AIM Ph.D. students as co-advisors.
AIM Ph.D. Graduates
2021-2022 Academic Year
| Student | Co-Advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
| Christina Athanasouli | Booth & Forger | Analyzing perturbations of sleep-wake dynamics using bifurcation theory and circle maps | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Christiana Mavroyiakoumou | Alben & Duraisamy | Membrane flutter in inviscid fluid flow. | New York University |
| Andrew McMillan | Ke & Doering | A Note on Dynamic Processes | Citi |
| Khoa Nguyen | Ji & Kane | M-theory on G2 manifold Moduli to phenomenology | Amazon, Inc. |
| Jenia Rousseva | Uribe & Aidala | Reduction and Propagation of Coherent States in Bargmann Spaces | |
| Ryan Sandberg | Krasny & Thomas | Vlasov Simulation with FARSIGHT and Unlimited Photon Acceleration | Berkeley Lab |
| Jack Wakefield | Karni & Saigal | Macroscopic Traffic Models with Behavior Variation Driven by Noise | University of Michigan |
| Eric Zhao | Veerapaneni & Gavini | Neural quantum states for scientific computing: applications to computational chemistry and finance | Amazon, LLC |
2020-2021 Academic Year
2019-2020 Academic Year
| Student | Co-Advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
| William Clark | Bloch & Grizzle | Invariant Measures, Geometry, and Control of Hybrid and Nonholonomic Dynamical Systems | Cornell University |
| Harry Lee | Doering & Wineman | Topics in Viscous Shear Flow Dynamics | Univeristy of Wisconsin |
| Matthew Olson | Doering & Schultz | Heat Transport in Reduced Order Convection Models | TBA |
| Nathanial Vaughn | Krasny & Gavini | GPU Accelerated Barycentric Treecodes and their Application to Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory | Los Alamos National Lab |
| Yun Wei | Hero & Nguyuen | Theoretical foundations for clustering and screening heterogeneous and high dimensional data | SAMSI & Duke University |
| Alexander Zaitzeff | Esedoglu & Garikipati | High Order Schemes for Gradient Flows | Two Six Labs, LLC |
2018-2019 Academic Year
| Student | Co-Advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
| Jiah Song | Karni & Saigal | Mathematical Modeling and Simulations of Traffic FlowData Scientist Analyst - Ford Motor Company MI | Ford Motor Company, Inc. |
| Andrew Melfi | Viswanath & Terhorst | Theoretical and Numerical Analyses of Deviations between Kingman's Coalescent and the Wright-Fisher Model | Google, LLC |
| Yitong Sun | Gilbert & Tewari | Random Features Methods in Supervised Learning | Huawei, Ltd. |
| Bowei Wu | Veerapaneni | Spectrally-accurate Algorithms For Simulating Vesicle Stokesian Flows And Their Application To Electrohydrodynamics | University of Texas at Austin |
| Hao Wu | Baik & Nadakuditi | New Applications of Random Matrix | Susquehanna International Group, LLP |
2017-2018 Academic Year
| Student | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
| Yining Lu | Forger & Lubensky | Mathematical Modelling of Circadian Rhythms from Cyanobacteria to Mammals. | Akuna Capital |
| Raymundo Navarrete | Viswanath & Scott | Embeddings and Prediction of Dynamical Time Series | University of Arizona |
| Scott Rich | Booth & Zochowski | Interacting Mechanisms Driving Synchrony in Neural Networks with Inhibitory Interneurons | Krembil Research Institute |
2016-2017 Academic Year
| Student | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
| Kevin Hannay | Forger & Booth | Macroscopic Models and Phase Resetting in Coupled Biological Oscillators | Schreiner University |
| Jeremy Hoskins | Gilbert & Schotland | Diffuse Scattering and Diffuse Optical Tomography on Graphs | Yale University |
2015-2016 Academic Year
| Student | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|
| David Prigge | Karni & Remi Abgrail-Zurich | Absorbing Boundary Conditions and Numerical Methods for the Linearized Water Wave Equation in 1 and 2 Dimensions | Farmers Insurance |
| Andre Souza | Viswanath & Doering | An Optimal Control Approach to Bounding Transport Properties of Thermal Convection | Georgia Tech |
| Olivia Walch | Forger & Koon Wong | Exploring subconscious vision and circadian rhythms through mathematical modeling | University of Michigan |
| Gary Marple | Veerapaneni & Eniola-Adefeso | Fast, High-order Algorithms for Simulating Vesicle Flows Through Constrained Geometries | University of Michigan |
| Jiaqi Li | Bayraktar & Uday Rajan | Stochastic Perron for Stochastic Target Problems | Goldman Sachs |
| Seyed Hamed Razavi | Bloch & Jessy Grizzle (EECS) | Symmetric Hybrid Systems: Periodic Gait Design for Legged Robots | EPFL, Switzerland |
| Wei Li | Borcea & Schotland | Nonlinear Wave Propagation in Deterministic and Stochastic Media | University of Minnesota |
2014-2015 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrew Brouwer | Epidemiology | Marisa Eisenberg & Rafael Meza | Models of HPV as an Infectious Disease and as an Etiological Agent of Cancer | University of Michigan |
| Daniel DeWoskin | Molecular and Integrative Physiology | Daniel Forger & Santiago Schnell | Multiscale Modeling of Coupled Oscillators with Applications to the Mammalian Circadian Clock | University of California, Davis |
| Brittan Farmer | Mechanical Engineering | Selim Esedoglu & John Hart | Modeling and Simulation of Carbon Nanotube Growth | University of Minnesota |
| Alfredo Wetzel | Earth and Environmental Sciences | Peter Miller & Brian Arbic | Three Stratified Fluid Models: Benjamin-Ono, Tidal Resonance, and Quasi-Geostrophy | University of Wisconsin |
| Yuchong Zhang | Finance | Erhan Bayraktar & Uday Rajan | Problems in Mathematical Finance Related to Transaction Costs and Model Uncertainty | Columbia University |
| Zhou Zhou | Business Technology and Operations | Erhan Bayraktar & Hyun Soo Ahn | Topics in Optimal Stopping and Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing | University of Minnesota |
2013-2014 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jeffrey Calder | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Selim Esedoglu & Alfred Hero | Hamilton-Jacobi Equations for Sorting and Percolation Problems | University of California, Berkeley |
| Maria Riolo | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Charles Doering & Pejman Rohani | Topics in Structured Host-Antagonist Interactions | University of Michigan |
| Jingchen Wu | Industrial and Operations Engineering | Joseph Conlon & Xiuli Chao | Some Problems in Stochastic Control Theory Related to Inventory Management and Coarsening | Amazon |
| Yilun Wu | Physics | Joel Smoller& Fred Adams | On Existence and Properties of Rotating Star Solutions to the Euler-Poisson Equations | Indiana University, Bloomington |
2012-2013 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peter Bosler | Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences | Robert Krasny & Christiane Jablonowski | Particle Methods for Geophysical Flow on the Sphere | University of Michigan |
| Sohhyun Chung | Industrial and Operations Ingeering | Joseph Conlon & Jussi Keppo |
The Impact of Volcker Rule on Bank Profits and Default Probabilities | Samsung Life Insurance |
| Huaiying Gu | Finance | Joseph Conlon & Haitao Li | Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Dynamic Portfolio Selection | Key Corp. |
| Yu-Jui Huang | Finance | Erhan Bayraktar & Haitao Li | Topics in Stochastic Control with Applications to Finance | Dublin City University |
| Jae Kyoung Kim | Biology | Daniel Forger & Victoria Booth | Mathematical Modeling and Analysis of Cellular Clocks (Winner of the Sumner B. Myers Award) |
Ohio State University |
| Kristofer-Roy Reyes | Materials Science | Peter Smereka & Joanna Mirecki Millunchick | Fast Kinetic Monte Carlo Simulations: Implementation, Application, and Analysis | Princeton University |
| Burhan Sadiq | Atmospheric Science | Divakar Viswanath & John Boyd | Finite Difference Methods, Hermite Interpolation and Quasi-Uniform Spectral Schemes | Johns Hopkins University |
| Paul Shearer | Physics | Anna GilbertRichard Frazin & Alfred Hero | Separable Inverse Problems, Blind Deconvolution, and Stray Light Correction for Extreme Ultraviolet Solar Images | University of Michigan |
2011-2012 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steven Flores | Physics | Charlie Doering & Robert Ziff (Also Peter Kleban, University of Maine) | Correlation Functions in Two-Dimensional Critical Systems with Conformal Symmetry | University of New Hampshire |
| Ashley Holland | Economics | Virginia Young & Matias Cattaneo |
Penalized Spline Estimation in the Partially Linear Model | Grace College |
| Xueying Hu | Finance | Erhan Bayraktar & Haitao Li | Essays in Financial and Insurance Mathematics | Goldman Sachs |
| Geri Izbicki-Jennings | Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering | Smadar Karni & Robert Beck | Efficient Numerical Methods for Water Wave Propagation in Unbounded Domains | University of Massachusetts |
| Matthew Masarik | Astronomy | Joel Smoller& Marta Volonteri | Decay of Solutions to the Wave Equation in Static Spherically Symmetric Spacetimes (Honorable Mention for the Rackham ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation award) |
SRI International |
| Lindsey McCarty | Industrial and Operations Engineering | Divakar Viswanath & Amy Cohn | Preemptive Rerouting of Airline Passengers under Uncertain Delays | Cedarville University |
| Darragh Rooney | Physics | Tony Bloch & Chitra Rangan | Control of Finite-Dimensional Quantum Systems under Lindblad Dissipation | Universität Würzburg, Germany |
| Dave Starinshak | Aerospace Engineering | Smadar Karni & Kenneth Powell | Level Set Methods for Multimaterial Radiative Shock Hydrodynamics | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory |
| Jared Whitehead | Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Science | Charlie Doering & Richard Rood | Topics in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics | Los Alamos National Laboratory |
2010-2011 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew Elsey | Mechanical Engineering | Selim Esedoglu & Wei Lu | Algorithms for Multiphase Motion with Applications to Materials Science (Winner of the Sumner B. Myers Award) |
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University |
| Brian Jennings | Chemistry | Alejandro Uribe & Eitan Geva | Generalized Lagrangian States and Their Propagation in Bargmann Space | Westfield State University |
| Ting Wang | Finance | Virginia Young & Haitao Li | Stochastic Analysis of Insurance Products | Goldman Sachs |
2009-2010 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Henry Boateng | Chemistry | Robert Krasny & Eitan Geva | Cartesian Treecode Algorithms for Electrostatic Interactions in Molecular Dynamics Simulations | University of Michigan |
| Catherine Kublik | Biomedical Engineering | Selim Esedoglu & Jeffrey Fessler | Topics in PDE-Based Image Processing (Winner of the Ralph B. Baldwin Prize in Astrophysics and Space Sciences) |
University of Texas, Austin |
| Tomoki Ohsawa | Physics | Tony Bloch & Leopoldo Pando-Zayas | Nonholonomic and Discrete Hamilton-Jacobi Theory | University of California, San Diego |
| Lei Wang | Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Science | Robert Krasny & John Boyd | Radial Basis Functions and Vortex Methods and their Application to Vortex Dynamics on a Rotating Sphere | Argonne National Laboratory |
| Zhengjie Xu | Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Science | Peter Miller& John Boyd | Asymptotic Analysis and Numerical Analysis of the Benjamin-Ono Equation | Bloomberg L.L.C. |
2008-2009 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arvind Baskaran | Mechanical Engineering | Peter Smereka & Krishna Garikipati | Modeling and Simulation of Heteroepitaxial Growth | Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (UCLA) |
| Katarina Bodova | Statistics | Charlie Doering & Anna Amirdjanova | Topics in Applied Stochastic Dynamics | Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia |
| Oscar Fernandez | Physics | Tony Bloch & Alberto Rojo | The Hamiltonization of Nonholonomic Systems and its Applications | University of Michigan |
| Russell Golman | Complex Systems / Political Science | Andreas Blass & Scott Page | Essays on Population Learning Dynamics and Boundedly Rational Behavior | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Ray Maleh | Biomedical Engineering | Anna Gilbert & Jeffrey Fessler | Fast Sparse Approximation Algorithms for Medical Imaging | L3 Communications |
| Sourya Shrestha | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Patrick Nelson & Aaron King | Modeling Transmission and Evolutionary Dynamics of Infectious Diseases | University of Michigan |
| Richard Vasques | Nuclear Engineering | Charlie Doering & Edward Larsen | Anisotropic Diffusion of Neutral Particles in Stochastic Media | McKinsey & Company |
2007-2008 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amy Bauer | Biology/Physics | Trachette Jackson & Yi Jiang | A Multi-Scale Cell-Based Model to Simulate and Elucidate the Mechanisms Controlling Tumor-Induced Angiogenesis | Los Alamos National Laboratory |
| Sara Gentry | Cellular and Developmental Biology | Trachette Jackson & Sean Morrison | Mathematical Modeling of Mutation Acquisition in Hierarchical Tissues: Quantification of the Cancer Stem Cell Hypothesis | University of Michigan |
| Mark Iwen | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Martin Strauss & Jignesh Patel | Algorithmic Compressed Sensing with Applications | Institute for Mathematics and its Applications |
| Jason Kutch | Mechanical/Biomedical Engineering | Tony Bloch & Art Kuo | Signal in Human Motor Unsteadiness: Detecting the Action and Activity of Muscles | University of Southern California, Biomedical Engineering |
| Jared Maruskin | Aerospace Engineering | Tony Bloch & Dan Scheeres | On the Dynamical Propagation of Subvolumes and on the Geometry and Variational Principles of Nonholonomic Systems | San Jose State University |
2006-2007 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyekyung Min | Industrial and Operations Engineering | Joseph Conlon & Jussi Keppo | Stochastic Control Models of Optimal Dividend and Capital Financing | University of California, Santa Barbara, Statistics and Applied Probability |
| Khachik Sargsyan | Physics | Charlie Doering & Leonard Sander | First Passage Times in the Near-Continuum Limit of Birth-Death Processes | Sandia National Laboratory |
| Andrew Stein | Physics | Trachette Jackson & Leonard Sander | Mathematical Models for Glioblastoma Invation in Vitro | Institute for Mathematics and its Applications |
2005-2006 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sebastien Chivoret | Statistics | Charlie Doering & Anna Amirdjanova | Properties of Multiple Stochastic Integrals with Respect to Fractional Brownian Motion and Applications to Nonlinear Filtering | Goldman Sachs |
| Jungmin Choi | Industrial and Operations Engineering | Mattias Jonsson & Jussi Keppo | Partial Hedging in Financial Markets with a Large Agent | Florida State University |
| Leon Kaganovskiy | Aerospace Engineering | Robert Krasny & Werner Dahm | Adaptive Hierarchical Tree-Based Panel Method for 3-D Vortex Sheet Motion | New College of Florida |
| Lu Lu | Geophysics | Charlie Doering & Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni | Bounds on the Enstrophy Growth Rate for Solutions of the 3D Navier-Stokes Equations | Wachovia Capital Markets |
2004-2005 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stanca Ciupe | Epidemiology | Patrick Nelson & James Koopman | Development and Applications of Mathematical Tools in Models of Infectious Diseases and Biological Phenomena | Santa Fe Institute/Los Alamos National Laboratory |
2003-2004 Academic Year
| Student | Partner Discipline | Co-advisors | Thesis | Initial Job Placement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Georgios Dalakouras | Finance | Kristen Moore & Tyler Shumway | A New Fast and Robust Technique for Pricing and Hedging Asian Options | Susquehanna Investment Group |
