Ian Grooms has been an Assistant Professor with the Applied Mathematics department since the fall of 2015. He received a BS in mathematics from the College of William and Mary in 2005, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from CU Boulder in 2011. He spent the last three years of his PhD in New York, and finished a four-year postdoc at the Courant Institute's Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science in 2015. He is part of the department's Mathematical Geosciences research group, and his research incorporates numerical simulation of fluids, multiscale and stochastic modeling, and uncertainty quantification. Professor Grooms teaches Calculus, Matrix Methods, Data Assimilation for High-Dimensional Dynamical Systems, and Numerical Analysis. When he's not doing math he's spending time with his wife and three kids.
Q: How did you become involved with Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Geoscience?
A: In college I wandered through Engineering, Physics, and Mathematics and developed a taste for problems combining mathematical analysis, computation, and physical systems. I did a summer REU and then independent study with an applied math faculty member who encouraged me to continue on to graduate school and get a PhD. My undergraduate research experience was in optimization and control, but I was continually drawn towards the beauty and complexity of fluid dynamics. In graduate school I worked on asymptotic analysis and numerical simulation of problems in geophysical fluid dynamics.
Q: What do you enjoy about Mathematical Geoscience?
A: I enjoy working in Mathematical Geoscience because it never gets old. The science is socially relevant and hugely diverse, encompassing fluids, electricity and magnetism, ice dynamics, biogeochemistry, etc, and the range of mathematical methods and ideas is similarly large, including dynamical systems, PDEs, numerical methods, spatial statistics, and uncertainty quantification, to name just a few.