Lu Zhang joined the Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operation Research as an Assistant Professor in 2023. Previously, she was the Ju Tang Chu and Wu Ping Chu Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and a graduate student in computational and applied mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at Southern Methodist University, where she received her Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics in 2020. She also worked as a summer research assistant at the Argonne National Laboratory in the summer of 2018, and as a summer research assistant at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the summer of 2019.
Research Areas
Lu Zhang’s research interests are in the areas of numerical and theoretical analysis of partial differential equations (PDEs) and applied mathematics. In particular, she focuses on developing high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods to study various PDEs with physical and biological backgrounds, such as advective (nonlinear) wave equations, seismic imaging problems, chemotaxis models, and population dynamics models. PDEs serve as fundamental language to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of phenomena in the physical and biological sciences. The challenges posed by the structural complexity and computational intensity within these dynamics require the application and development of high-order, computationally efficient, and energy-stable numerical methods. The theoretical analysis of these systems also provides insight into and contributes to the understanding of the continuum system. She also works on the development of efficient and robust algorithms for inverse problems.