CQSB Personnel

In addition to the CQSB
Directorate, scientists from within and outside NCSU are
affiliated with CQSB.
CQSB Members:
- Azmy S Ackleh. Dr. Ackleh is the Dr. Ray
P. Authement/BORSF Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Computational
Mathematics and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette. He is an internationally recognized researcher
in the area of mathematical biology, with more than 80 research
publications. For the past 15 years his research, funded by NSF, NIH
and DOI, has been focused on the development and analysis of
deterministic and stochastic models describing the dynamics of
invasive populations, amphibians, genetic selection-mutation,
erythropoiesis, and epidemics. He has a strong record of collaboration
with biologists and public health scientists.
- Ariel Cintron-Arias . Dr. Cintron-Arias'
research interests lie in the areas of nonlinear dynamics,
mathematical modeling, and parameter estimation. Specifically,
transmission dynamics of infectious diseases, modeling of within-host
dynamics, complex networks, and uncertainty and sensitivity analysis.
-
Mansoor
Haider. Dr. Haider joined the NCSU faculty in 1999 and
conducts research on applications of mathematics and scientific
computing to problems in biomechanics and bioengineering. His areas
of expertise include multiphasic continuum mechanics, contact problems
and numerical solution of partial differential equations. Current
research interests include boundary integral methods, finite element
models of cell-matrix interactions and mathematical modeling of tissue
engineering.
- Shuhua Hu. Dr. Hu has been a Postdoctoral
research associate in Center for Research in Scientific Computation,
North Carolina State University since 2005. She received her Ph.D. in
applied mathematics from University of Louisiana at Lafayette in
December 2004. Her research is in the general area of applied
mathematics with particular focus on applications of mathematical
techniques and computational tools to model various biological
processes.
- Jacqueline M. Hughes-Oliver.
Dr. Hughes-Oliver is Professor of Statistics and Co-Director of
Graduate Programs for the Department at Statistics at NC State
University, where she has been on the faculty since 1992. She earned
her PhD in 1991 from NC State University and spent one year as
Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of
Wisconsin--Madison. Dr. Hughes-Oliver is also Director of the
Exploratory Center for Cheminformatics Research at NC State University
(ECCR @ NCSU). Dr. Hughes-Oliver has made important contributions in a
number of research areas including statistical methods for drug
discovery, spatial modeling of point sources with applications to
environmental health studies, and group testing techniques relevant
to, for example, screening compounds for activities. She has been
heavily involved in collaborative research with many scientists at
private companies as well as government organizations.
- Julie Simmons Ivy.
Dr. Ivy s an assistant professor in the Edward P. Fitts Department of
Industrial and Systems Engineering and Fitts Faculty Fellow in Health
Systems Engineering. She previously spent several years on the
faculty of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of
Michigan. She received her B.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial and
Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. She also
received her M.S. in Operations Research at Georgia Tech. Her research
interests are mathematical modeling of stochastic dynamic systems with
emphasis on statistics and decision analysis as applied to health
care, manufacturing, and service environments. The focus of her
research is decision making under conditions of uncertainty with the
objective of improving the decision quality. The focus of her research
is decision making under conditions of uncertainty with the objective
of improving the decision quality. Dr. Ivy's research program seeks to
develop novel concepts of maintenance and monitoring policies and
associated scientific theories, and apply them specifically to two
important application domains: industrial and medical decision
making. The goals of this research are: 1) to develop "better" models
of processes, whether industrial or medical, will allow the discovery
or evaluation of good, if not "optimal," policies; and 2) to show how
good models can produce implementable policies. Dr. Ivy has extensive
background in stochastic modeling, in particular the application of
partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and Markov
decision processes (MDPs) for maintenance optimization. In addition,
she has experience in medical decision making studying the
cost-effectiveness of mammography screening, dynamic breast cancer
screening policy development, and false positive prediction as a
function of breast cancer screening policy.
- Grace M. Kepler. Dr. Kepler is interested
in working on challenging problems that use quantitative and
mathematical techniques to make advancements in biomedical
research. She has extensive experience in mathematical modeling and
simulation, including use of ordinary and partial differential
equations, finite difference equations, and stochastic
simulations. She is currently involved in exciting ongoing research
efforts to apply mathematical modeling to important issues in
transplant medicine and efforts with a pharmaceutical partner to
utilize mechanistic modeling to elucidate drug-induced toxicity of
compounds under development.
- Michael Kosorok.
Dr. Kosorok is Professor and Chair of Biostatistics and Professor of
Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. His research interests include biostatistics, empirical
processes, semiparametric inference, clinical trials, survival
analysis, reinforcement learning and mathematical modeling of diseases
such as cancer and cystic fibrosis. He is an Associate Editor of the
Annals of Statistics and a Fellow of both the American Statistical
Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
- Alun Lloyd.
Dr. Lloyd is a faculty member in the NC State Department of Mathematics and
is Director of the Biomathematics Graduate Program. His research uses
mathematical models and statistical approaches to study the spread of
infectious diseases, both at the between-host (epidemiological) and
within-host level. He is also interested in the use of transgenic mosquitoes
as a means of controlling vector-borne infections such as dengue: this work
combines ecological, population genetic and epidemiological modeling.
- Wenbin Lu. Dr. Lu is an Assistant
Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University. His
research focuses on survival analysis, semiparametric inference,
longitudinal data analysis, and machine learning methods in model
selection. Dr. Lu has conducted methodological research on
semiparametric models estimation, inference and selection for various
types of outcomes including time-to-event data, multivariate survival
time data, longitudinal data, genetic data and high dimensional data
with multiple applications in medical studies, epidemiological studies
and genetic studies.
- Sharon Lubkin. Dr. Lubkin models mechanical
problems in soft tissues - morphogenesis, biomechanics, transport,
mechanobiology, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. She has
collaborated with people from many other areas, and worked on problems
from urban sprawl to cancer treatment to the behavioral dynamics of
marital interactions. Her research is partially funded by the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She is
always interested in new collaborations with biologists and medical
researchers.
- Alison Motsinger-Reif. Dr. Motsinger-Reif
is an Assistant Professor of Statistics, in the Bioinformatics
Research Center at NCSU, and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the
Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy at UNC
Chapel. She received an M.S. in Applied Statistics and a PhD in Human
Genetics both from Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on the
development and application of computation methods detect gene-gene
and gene-environment interactions that predict complex human
phenotypes, such as common diseases and drug response phenotypes.
- Mette
Olufsen. Dr. Olufsen's research is related to development
of patient specific models predicting dynamics of cardiovascular flow
and its regulation. Specific questions studied include development of
lumped parameter and fluid dynamics models of the cardiovascular and
respiratory systems and development of models predicting short term
control of homeostasis for these systems. To make these models patient
specific, she is interested in understanding scaling laws and
anthropometric relations used to estimate model parameters and for
development of methods for parameter identification and estimation.
- Michael
Pedersen. Dr. Pedersen's research focuses on problems in
the mathematical biosciences, in particular models involving partial
differential equations (PDEs), including control problems for
biological models governed by PDEs.
- Stephen
D. Roberts. Dr. Roberts has been a Professor at North
Carolina State University in the Edward P. Fitts Department of
Industrial and Systems Engineering since 1990. From 1990 to 1999 he
served as Head of the Industrial Engineering Department at NC
State. Previously, he spent four years on the faculty at the
University of Florida, and 18 years as a joint Professor at Purdue
University School of Industrial Engineering and at the Indiana
University School of Medicine Department of Medicine and was on staff
at Regenstrief Institute for Health Care in Indianapolis, Indiana. His
general research interests are in discrete-event simulation and the
modeling of medical decisions. He has conducted cost-effectiveness
research on end stage renal disease, oxygen therapy, diabetes
immunization, hypertension, Chlamydia, renal revascularization,
myocardial infarction, renal artery stenosis, and colorectal cancer
among others. He has been very active with the Winter Simulation
Conference, serving as Program Chair, Proceedings Editor, Track
coordinator, and presenter. He was on the WSC Board of Directors for
eight years, serving in all officer capacities. He is currently on the
Board of the Winter Simulation Conference Foundation.
- Karyn
L. Sutton. Dr. Sutton joined the Center for Quantitative
Studies in Biomedicine and the Center for Research in Scientific
Computation in April 2008 after finishing her PhD at Arizona State
University in March 2008. She works on mathematical modeling of
biological and physical processes such as social netorks, cell
proliferation, and epidemiology. Particularly she is interested in
mathematical and statistical aspects of inverse problem methods, and
the ways in which they can be applied to understand
observed/experimental data, and to guide experimental design.
- Hien T. Tran. Dr. Tran received the
B.S. degree in Mathematics from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA,
in 1980, the M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics in 1982, and the
Ph.D. degree in Mathematics in 1986, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, NY. From 1986 to 1989 he was a Visiting Assistant
Professor with the Center for Control Sciences at Brown
University. Since 1989, he has been with the Department of Mathematics
and the Center for Research in Scientific Computation at North
Carolina State University. He was a Visiting Professor at the
University of the Philippines in 2000. He has authored 82 research
papers in the areas of approximation methods for infinite dimensional
systems, reduced order based feedback control design and synthesis,
and mathematical modeling of biological and physical systems. His
current areas of interest are the development of inverse problem and
nonlinear feedback control methodologies, mathematical modeling and
control of HIV dynamics and cardiovascular physiology.
- Reha Uzsoy. Dr. Uzsoy is
Clifton A. Anderson Distinguished Professor in the Edward P. Fitts
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina
State University. He holds BS degrees in Industrial Engineering and
Mathematics and an MS in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici
University, Istanbul, Turkey. He received his Ph.D in Industrial and
Systems Engineering in 1990 from the University of Florida. His
teaching and research interests are in production planning,
scheduling, supply chain management and the design of production and
service systems. He is the author of one book, an edited book, and
over eighty refereed journal publications. Before coming to the US he
worked as a production engineer with Arcelik AS, a major appliance
manufacturer in Istanbul, Turkey. He has also worked as a visiting
researcher at Intel Corporation and IC Delco. His research has been
supported by the National Science Foundation, Intel Corporation,
Hitachi Semiconductor, Harris Corporation, Kimberly Clark, Union
Pacific, Ascension Health and General Motors. He was named a Fellow of
the Institute of Industrial Engineers in 2005, Outstanding Young
Industrial Engineer in Education in 1997 and a University Faculty
Fellow by Purdue University in 2001, and has received awards for both
undergraduate and graduate teaching. He is currently serving on the
Editorial Boards of IIE Transactions on Scheduling and Logistics and
International Journal of Computer-Integrated Manufacturing.
- Daowen
Zhang. Dr. Zhang's major research area is
biostatistics. Specifically, he is interested in developing models and
methods for analyzing longitudinal data or biomedical data that has a
longitudinal component. This is different from a classical study,
where each study subject contributes only one data point; here, the
study subjects are followed over time in a longitudinal study and
multiple (usually time-ordered) measurements of variables of interest
are taken for each subject. Due to its design, a longitudinal study
enables evaluation of the change of the variables of
interest. However, it is challenging to analyze longitudinal data due
to the fact that data from the same individuals are correlated and
this correlation has to be taken into account for valid inference. In
the past several years, Dr. Zhang has developed models for
longitudinal data such as semiparametric mixed models, generalized
additive mixed models, etc. Recently, he is working with his
colleagues and students in developing variables selection procedures
for different mixed models for longitudinal data. Dr. Zhang is also
interested in developing methodology for correlated data, with
application in epidemiology and statistical genetics.
CQSB Graduate Pre-Doctoral Fellows:
- Zifang Guo. Zifang is a first year PhD student
in the Department of Statistics. She has a BS in
Biological Science from Tsinghua University and a MS in Biophysics
from Boston University.
- Kathleen Holm.
Kathleen is a first year PhD student in the Biomathematics Graduate Program. She has a
BS in Mathematics from Colorado State University and a MS in Applied
Mathematics from the University of Arizona.
- Danielle Robbins.
Danielle is a first year PhD student in the Biomathematics Graduate Program.
Danielle earned a BS in Applied Mathematics from the University of
Maryland Baltimore County, where she was a Meyerhoff Scholar. She
also holds a M.A. in Applied Mathematics from Arizona State
University.
- Clay Thompson.
Clay is a first year PhD student in Applied Mathematics in the Department of
Mathematics. Clay earned a BS in Mathematics (with a minor
in Physics), with highest distinction, from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Nathan Wanner.
Nathan is a first year PhD student in the Biomathematics Graduate Program. He has a
BS in Applied Mathematics from Loyola Marymount University (with a minor
in Biology).
CQSB Administrative Assistant:
Lesa R. Denning
304 Cox Hall
Phone:(919) 515-5289
Fax: (919) 515-1636
email:
lesa_denning@ncsu.edu