Lu Zhang

I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at Rice University. Previously, I was a Ju Tang Chu and Wu Ping Chu assistant professor at the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University.

I obtained a Master’s in Computational and Applied Mathematics in 2017 and a Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics in 2020 from the Department of Mathematics at Southern Methodist University, under the supervision of Thomas Hagstrom.

My research interests are numerical and theoretical analysis of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), applied mathematics, and seismic imaging in general. In particular, I focus on developing high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods in studying various PDEs with physical and biological backgrounds, such as advective wave equations, semi-linear wave equations, chemotaxis models, population dynamics models, etc. PDEs serve as the fundamental languages that describe the spatial-temporal dynamics of the phenomena within the physical and biological sciences. The challenges brought by the structural complexity and computational intensity within these dynamics call for the applications and development of high-order, computationally efficient and energy-stable numerical methods. Theoretical analysis of these systems also yields insights into and contributes to the understanding of the continuum system. I am also working on developing efficient and robust algorithms for inverse problems.