Dr.Du earned Ph.D. in Mathematics (1988) from Carnegie Mellon University. He then worked as a Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago, after which he held tenured and visiting faculty positions at a few institutions in the US and Hong Kong. Most recently, he was the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State University, before joining Columbia in 2014. Recognitions for Dr. Du’s work include Frame Faculty Teaching Award (1992), Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for outreach/extension (2000), Feng Kang prize in scientific computing (2005), Eberly College of Science Medal (2007), SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Outstanding Paper prize (2016), ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist (2016), SIAM Review SIGEST Award (2020), US Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM) Thomas J.R. Hughes Medal (2021), and ICBS Fronteris of Science Award (2024). He is a fellow of SIAM, AMS (American Mathematics Society), and AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). He was also an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2018).

Dr.Du is a founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Diamond-Open-Access journal Communications of the American Mathematical Society (2020-), and the Editor-in-Chief of SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics (2021-, after serving as a Section Editor and an associated editor). He also serves on the editorial board of more than a dozen other international journals and book series. He was elected as the Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Mathematical Aspects of Materials Science (2014-2016). He also served as a representative to the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, the National Academies (2015-2019).

Dr.Du’s research interests are in mathematical modeling, analysis, and scientific computation with selected applications in physical, biological, and materials sciences, as well as data and information sciences and machine learning. At Columbia, Dr.Du leads the group of CM3 (Computational Mathematics and Multiscale Modeling) in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics (APAM).