Two new Visiting Professors have joined the Mathematics and Computer Science Department this year. Russ Park has joined us from Arizona State University and Choong-Soo Lee from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Russ joined the department last February. He completed his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at San Diego State University in 1984 and then worked for 18 years as an engineer at the Motorola Government Electronics Group and at Microtest Inc., both in the Phoenix area. He then attended grad school at Arizona State University, earning an M.N.S. in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2009.
His dissertation in the area of reconstruction theory, having nothing to do with civil war era history, was titled Optimal Compression and Numerical Stability for Gegenbauer Reconstructions with Applications. His research interests now are in partial differential equations, optimization and visualizations.
In any given year Russ manages to cycle a couple thousand miles and enjoys hiking elevation changes in order to burn off calories from all the foods he enjoys cooking and sampling. Between meals and teaching math classes, Russ likes to read about the history and philosophies of science, civilization and world religions, Christian Apologetics in particular. And if you can actually track him down, he is likely to be listening to classical, folk, rock or new age-y sounding music.
Choong-Soo joined us this fall. He was born in Korea and then moved to the Philippines when he was 14. He attended Wesleyan University as an undergraduate where he majored in Computer Science, Economics, and Physics (and no this is not a typo). In 2010 Choong-Soo completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at WPI. His dissertation is entitled A Credit-based Home Access Point to Improve Application Quality on IEEE802.11 Networks. His areas of research include multimedia, network games, wireless networks, and related networking applications.
While earning his Ph.D, Choong-Soo took a leave of absence to complete his mandatory military service in South Korea where he worked with both Republic of Korea and U.S. military officers. His non-academic interests include classical music, hiking, and video gaming.