Welcoming 45 New NSF-Simons NITMB Affiliate Members
- NITMB
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
The NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics is excited to welcome 45 new NITMB Affiliate Members to the Institute! NITMB Affiliate Members are faculty from institutions external to Northwestern University and the University of Chicago who want to become regular and active participants in NITMB research, convening programs, and training.
Explore the table below to meet our new Affiliate Members. More information on these individuals and the NITMB Affiliate Members program is available at https://www.nitmb.org/affiliate-membership
Alex Albaugh
Mark Alber
Benjamin Allen
Olga Anosova
Name: Olga Anosova
Home Institution: University of Liverpool
Email: odanosova@gmail.com
Bio: I'm a data scientist developing the emerging area of Geometric Data Science for applications in mathematical crystallography, geometry of proteins, and mathematical modelling. My PhD thesis was devoted to foundational results on invariant manifolds in dynamical systems. Later work applied invariant theory to crystallography, developing complete, continuous, and polynomial-time invariants for classifying periodic point sets and crystal structures under rigid motion and isometry, leading to efficient geometric representations and predictive models. The new mathematical definition of a crystal structure as an equivalence class under rigid motion (IUCrJ 2024) and implementation of structural invariants (Pattern Recognition 2026) led to uncovering large-scale duplication in the Cambridge Structural Database, Google's GNoME dataset, and Protein Data Bank (MATCH 2025).
Erin Brandt
Zixuan Cang
Vasileios Charisopoulos
Calina Copos
Name: Calina Copos
Home Institution: Northeastern University
Email: c.copos@northeastern.edu
Bio: Calina Copos is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Biology at Northeastern University. Her research group is broadly interested in mathematical biology and numerical and computational methods for PDEs, with a particular focus on the cell cytoskeleton and cell migration in tissue development, homeostasis, and regeneration. Prof. Copos received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at University of California, Davis and did her postdoctoral work at the Courant Institute at New York University.
Sharon Crook
Breschine Cummins
Name: Breschine Cummins
Home Institution: Montana State University
Gökçe Dayanıklı
Name: Gökçe Dayanıklı
Home Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Email: gokced@illinois.edu
Bio: I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with affiliate appointments in Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. My research focuses on the mathematical modeling and analysis of complex societal and biological systems, including the design of optimal incentives and policies that account for human behavioral responses to those interventions. I integrate theory from stochastic optimal control, game-theoretic frameworks such as mean field games and control and Stackelberg equilibria, and computational tools including Monte Carlo simulation, machine learning, and reinforcement learning to develop scalable algorithms. My primary application areas include epidemic spread modeling and mitigation, and climate policy. I am also interested in interdisciplinary applications in non-biology domains, such as market design, economics, and opinion dynamics.
Tahra Eissa
Name: Tahra Eissa
Home Institution: University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine
Email: tahra.eissa@cuanschutz.edu
Bio: Dr. Tahra Eissa is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physiology& Biophysics and Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine. Her interests center around computational neuroscience with a focus on the cognitive strategies and neural mechanisms that support decision-making and inference of latent environmental statistics. Her work incorporates human online behavioral testing, intracranial brain recordings, and a wide range of behavioral and neural modeling approaches. She has a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary work and collaboration, bridging experimental findings and computational modeling to better understand the human brain.
Lisa Fauci
Daniel Forger
John Glasser
Name: John Glasser
Home Institution: Emory University
Email: jwglass@emory.edu
Bio: John Glasser studied population biology, epidemiology, and biostatistics at Princeton, Duke, and Harvard Universities, served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer in the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, the late Richard Levins’ postdoctoral fellow in mathematical biology, and a mathematical epidemiologist in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Currently, he is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management and member of the graduate faculty in Population Biology, Ecology, and Evolution at Emory University and an Associate Editor of Mathematical Biosciences. He is interested in transmission modeling to design or evaluate and possibly improve vaccination policy to prevent or control respiratory diseases.
Trevor GrandPre
Name: Trevor GrandPre
Home Institution: Washington University in St. Louis
Email: trevorg@wustl.edu
Bio: Trevor GrandPre is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, where his research focuses on non-equilibrium statistical physics and soft condensed matter, with a particular focus on critical phenomena in biological systems. His group investigates how physical laws shape living matter, studying topics such as the regulation of biomolecular condensates, which are membraneless cellular compartments that form through phase separation, and their roles in gene regulation and cell-cycle control. Other areas of interest include phase transitions in adaptive immune systems, such as the co-evolution of bacteria and phages as well as immune cell dynamics, and the use of physics-informed machine learning to construct optimal coarse-grained models of proteins and other biophysical systems. Trevor earned his B.S. in Physics from DePaul University in 2014 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. From 2021 to 2025, he was an independent postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Physics of Biological Function (CPBF) and the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS), and a Schmidt Science Fellow at Princeton University.
Michael Hawrylycz
Jingrui He
Name: Jingrui He
Home Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Email: jingrui@illinois.edu
Bio: Dr. Jingrui He is a Professor at School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010. Her research focuses on heterogeneous machine learning, active learning, neural bandits, and self-supervised learning, with applications in security, agriculture, social network analysis, healthcare, and finance. Dr. He is the recipient of the 2016 NSF CAREER Award, the 2020 OAT Award, the 2025 Amazon Research Award, three times recipient of the IBM Faculty Award in 2018, 2015 and 2014 respectively, and was selected as IJCAI 2017 Early Career Spotlight. Dr. He has more than 200 publications at major conferences (e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD) and journals (e.g., TMLR, TKDD, JMLR, JAIR), and is the author of two books. Her papers have received the Distinguished Paper Award at FAccT 2022, the Outstanding Paper Award at ICCV 2025 MMRAgI Workshop, as well as Bests of the Conference at ICDM 2016, ICDM 2010, and SDM 2010. Dr. He is a Distinguished Member of ACM, a Senior Member of AAAI and IEEE. She is also the Program Co-chair of IEEE BigData 2023.
Caitlin Hult
Dwueng-Chwuan Jhwueng
Name: Dwueng-Chwuan Jhwueng
Home Institution: Feng-Chia University
Email: dcjhwueng@fcu.edu.tw
Bio: I am a Professor of Statistics at Feng Chia University in Taichung, Taiwan. My research focuses on statistical phylogenetics, developing and applying methods at the intersection of stochastic processes and comparative biology. My group investigates diffusion-based and heteroskedastic rate models (OU/GBM/CIR; ARMA/GARCH-type branch-rate processes) for trait evolution and creates likelihood-free (ABC) and Bayesian pipelines for model fitting and selection. Recent projects include phylogenetic negative binomial regression for count traits, diagnostic checklists for model adequacy and identifiability on trees and networks, and reproducible R/Python toolkits for simulation-based inference. I am dedicated to connecting foundational theory with empirical applications and teaching through seminars, tutorials, and code clinics that make advanced methods in mathematical biology more accessible.  https://tonyjhwueng.info/Â
https://stat.fcu.edu.tw/en/teachers-detail/?id=T00237&unit_id=CB07
Kresimir Josic
Name: Kresimir Josic
Home Institution: University of Houston
Email: kresimir.josic@gmail.com
Bio: Krešimir Josić is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Houston with adjunct appointments in Biology and Biochemistry at UH, and BioSciences at Rice. He received his Phd in 1999 under the supervision of C. Eugene Wayne, in applied dynamical systems. Over the last 25 years he has worked in different areas of mathematical biology, with a focus on understanding the structure of neuronal activity, and modeling single celled organisms from the level of signaling pathwaysto large microbial populations. He also regularly contributes to the program Engines of Our Ingenuity which is broadcast by over 50 NPR stations nationwide.
Jae Kyoung Kim
Laura Kubatko
Vitaliy Kurlin
Name: Vitaliy Kurlin
Home Institution: University of Liverpool
Email: vitaliy.kurlin@gmail.com
Bio: Professor Vitaliy Kurlin is a mathematician by training and leads the Data Science Theory and Applications group in the Materials Innovation Factory at the University of Liverpool, UK. The group develops the emerging area of Geometric Data Science for applications in crystallography, chemistry, and structural biology. The recent funding includes the Royal Academy of Engineering Industry Fellowship, EPSRC New Horizons, and the Royal Society APEX Fellowship in the UK.
Huiling Liao
Sarah Marzen
Alex McAvoy
Name: Alex McAvoy
Home Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: amcavoy@unc.edu
Rohan Mehta
Xiangyi Meng
Duc Nguyen
Noah Rosenberg
Laura Patricia Schaposnik Massolo
Name: Laura Patricia Schaposnik Massolo
Home Institution: University of Illinois at Chicago
Email: schapos@uic.edu
Bio: Laura P. Schaposnik is an Argentinian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research sits at the intersection of geometry, topology, and mathematical physics, with a focus on moduli spaces of decorated bundles, and also leads applied projects in network science and mathematical modeling. Prof. Schaposnik received the 2025 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), as well as an NSF CAREER award, a Simons Fellowship, and a Humboldt Fellowship. She is actively involved in mentoring and outreach, including the development of bilingual STEM books for young readers. Prof. Schaposnik will deliver the AMS-MAA Invited Lecture at MathFest 2026.
Sebastian Schreiber
Name: Sebastian Schreiber
Home Institution: University of California, Davis
Email: sschreiber@ucdavis.edu
Daniel Seara
Jake Soloff
Name: Jake Soloff
Home Institution: University of Michigan
Email: soloff@umich.edu
Bio: Jake A. Soloff is an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Michigan. His research examines the theoretical foundations of statistical machine learning, aiming to develop methods that are both principled and broadly applicable. He received his PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley in 2022, advised by Aditya Guntuboyina and Michael I. Jordan, and completed a postdoc at the University of Chicago with Rina Foygel Barber and Rebecca Willett.
Jan-Hendrik Spille
Mikhail Tikhonov
Name: Mikhail Tikhonov
Home Institution: Washington University in St Louis
Email: tikhonov@wustl.edu
Bio: Mikhail Tikhonov is a theoretical physicist and quantitative biologist, appointed an Associate Professor of Physics at Washington University in St Louis. His group applies ideas and methods from statistical physics to study eco-evolutionary feedbacks in high-diversity microbial ecosystems, and evolution in changing or fluctuating environments. He received his Master's degree from Ecole Normale Superieure in 2009, and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2014.
Hanghang Tong
Name: Hanghang Tong
Home Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Email: htong@illinois.edu
Reidun Twarock
Ning Wei
Kristina Wicke
Name: Kristina Wicke
Home Institution: New Jersey Institute of Technology
Email: kristina.wicke@njit.edu
Bio: Kristina Wicke obtained her PhD in Biomathematics from the University of Greifswald (Germany) in 2020. She then spent two years as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University (USA) and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (USA). Her research focuses on mathematical phylogenetics, particularly on the combinatorial properties of phylogenetic trees and networks, the estimation of phylogenetic trees and networks from genomic data, and the application of phylogenetic methods in biodiversity conservation.
Kelin Xia
Guanao Yan
Qiong Yang
Wenjun Zhao
