Dr. Du earned Ph.D. in Mathematics (1988) from Carnegie Mellon University, after which he has held faculty positions at University of Chicago, Michigan State University, Iowa State University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.  Dr.Du was most recently the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State University. Recognitions for Dr. Du’s work include the Frame Faculty Teaching Award (1992) at Michigan State University, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for outreach/extension (2000), the Feng Kang prize in scientific computing (2005), the Eberly College of Science Medal (2007) from Penn State University, and his selection as a 2013 SIAM Fellow for contributions to applied and computational mathematics with applications in materials science, computational geometry, and biology.

Dr. Du’s research interests are in numerical analysis, mathematical modeling and scientific computation with selected applications in physical, biological, materials, data and information sciences. Topics of particular relevance to IDSE include his studies on topological analysis and geometric modeling of data and images, fast algorithms for clustering analysis, reduced order representations of dynamic data sets, and uncertainty quantifications of materials database.

Personal homepage: http://www.columbia.edu/~qd2125/