SIAM NExT Fellow Manuchehr Aminian
Congratulations to a Ph.D. graduate from our department. Dr. Manuchehr “Nuch” Aminian, has been selected as the recipient of the 2021 SIAM Project NExT Fellowship!
SIAM recognizes the importance of supporting the professional development of junior faculty, especially in the areas of teaching and applied mathematics education. While the Activity Group on Applied Mathematics Education, SIAG/ED, certainly addresses this need, SIAM began annually sponsoring two Project NExT, New Experiences in Teaching, Fellows for the first time last year.
Project NExT, which is run by the Mathematical Association of America, MAA, supports the professional development of new or recent Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences. As per the MAA, the program “addresses all aspects of an academic career, improving the teaching and learning of mathematics, engaging in research and scholarship, finding exciting and interesting service opportunities, and participating in professional activities.”
In 2020, Carl Giuffre, Adelphi University, and Lidia Mrad, Mount Holyoke College, became the first two SIAM Project NExT Fellows. The 2021 SIAM Project NExT Fellowship was recently awarded to Manuchehr Aminian and Alvaro Ortiz.
Aminian is an Assistant Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. His research interests include the analysis of passive tracers in advection-diffusion systems, anomaly detection and feature selection in large biological data sets, and mathematical data science in general.
Aminain strongly believes that genuine application problems and numerical mathematics can positively impact both mathematics students and other majors. Math educators must take a leading role in familiarizing students – the future leaders – with modeling, data, and algorithms, all of which already play a central role in everyday life. He has incorporated these ideas into a variety of classes during his early teaching career, ranging from first-semester calculus for biologists to undergraduate numerical analysis.
Aminian has found his SIAM membership to be extremely useful for keeping up with the cutting edge of applied mathematics via conferences, activity groups, and the print version of SIAM News. Project NExT complements his objectives by promoting evidence-based teaching practices&mdashsuch as inquiry-based learning and projects&mdashand providing a peer network of early-career faculty with whom to compare notes and effect broader change in the applied mathematics community and beyond.