Jonathan Rubin

  • Professor, PhD

Dr. Rubin majored in Mathematics as an undergraduate at The College of William and Mary and received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 1996.  He was a Zassenhaus Assistant Professor and then a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at The Ohio State University before joining the Pitt Mathematics faculty in 2000.  In addition to his Mathematics position, he is a Graduate Faculty member, a Center for Neuroscience at University of Pittsburgh Graduate Training Faculty member, a member of the Center for the Basis of Neural Cognition, an affiliate of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a member of the SIAM Fellows Class of 2021, and a Visiting Professor in Computational Biology. 14 students have completed their PhDs at Pitt under Dr. Rubin’s supervision or co-supervision. He has also mentored 8 postdoctoral fellows.

Education & Training

  • PhD, Brown University (Applied Mathematics)

Research Area

Research Interests

Transients and Multiple Timescale Dynamics

Dr. Rubin works on theoretical and applied problems coming from neuroscience, as well as on parameter estimation,  inflammation, and other problems in mathematical biology in collaboration with students, postdocs, and medical school faculty. In the neuroscience area, Dr. Rubin's research focuses on rhythmic activity patterns and control in respiratory and locomotor networks, pathological dynamics and therapeutic interventions for movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, neuronal dynamics associated with decision-making, propagation of activity on graphs, and bursting and other multiple timescale activity patterns. Many of his projects fall into the general theme of spatio-temporal pattern formation in networks of coupled neurons or other interacting units.