Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship Winners: Rui Fang and Farjana Siddiqua
Andrew Mellon Fellowships are awarded to students of exceptional ability and promise who are enrolled in programs leading to the PhD in various fields of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
Candidates for the Mellon Fellowship must be nominated by their department. Departments are required to rank their candidates, provide a summary statement of each candidate’s strengths, and explain the basis of their ranking to the Mellon Committee in Arts and Sciences.
Andrew Mellon Fellowships are expected to engage in full-time study during the period of their fellowship. Students should be in good academic standing: they should have passed the PhD Comprehensive Examination, have a GPA of 3.0 or higher, and should be making good progress toward earning a PhD.
Rui Fang
I am a graduate student from the numerical group working with Prof. Layton. My research combines rigorously analyzed numerical methods and novel machine-learning algorithms to improve models and predictions in fluid flow simulations. The Navier-Stokes equations govern fluid flow and the math model of the evolutional incompressible Navier-Stokes equation is:
I am working on ensemble and penalty methods with Monte Carlo to increase prediction ability. The proposed research includes a doubly pointwise adaptive penalty methods on time and space, machine learning to calibrate adaptive parameters, and time discretization on the modified penalty method.
Fluid dynamics is complex and critical to system design in nearly every field. I will build accurate, easy-implemented, cheap, and efficient algorithms. Added to my research, I am part of the Graduate Student Organization, and Association for Women in Mathematics. I help to build a better math community at Pitt. The Mellon Fellowship allows me time to dedicate to research, push it further, and serve the math community.
Farjana Siddiqua
My PhD research is critical because it leads to improvements in the applied areas of biomedicine, and pharmaceutical development, as well as for continuing to improve the stability of viscosity models and the accuracy of turbulent flow simulation while reducing computational costs.
The Mellon Fellowship gives me an incredible opportunity to continue conducting research with greater depth and effectiveness. It not only provides the resources and financial support to continue my work in numerical analysis and scientific computing, specifically in the areas of computational fluid dynamics and large eddy simulation of turbulent flows, but provides me with the opportunity to collaborate with leading experts, attend relevant conferences and workshops, and grants me access to advanced resources and software tools to conduct large-scale simulations and analyze data more comprehensively, which, in turn, I hope my research will be a meaningful contribution to my field.
Graduation Award Winners
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- Matthew Alford
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2023 Silverman-Culver Recipients
- Idrees Khan
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John O. Blumberg Memorial Scholarship
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Dr. Beverly K. Michael Math Education Award
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Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship Award
- Rui Fang
- Farjana Siddiqua
2023 Silverman-Culver Recipient (Grad)
- Arshia Gharagozlou
Mathematics Teaching Assistant Excellence Award
- Joseph Bedich
- Sara Weinstein
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Whittington Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
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