Wang Awarded NSF CAREER Grant For Differential Equation Research

The CAREER program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars…

SAN MARCOS – Chunmei Wang, assistant professor of mathematics at Texas State University, has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for future research into solving partial differential equations.

The five-year Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant was awarded by the Computational Mathematics Program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences of NSF. The $400,000 grant will fund Wang’s research project, “Primal-Dual Weak Galerkin (PD-WG) Finite Element Methods.”

The CAREER program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are an important mathematical tool for modeling many scientific problems and the most common approach for solving these equations usually involves numerical methods.

The goal of this project is to extend the theory and develop novel numerical methods of one such method known as the PD-WG algorithm. The resulting computational codes will be made publicly available.

In addition, Wang will apply the new methods to several problems in biology and physical sciences. One exciting application is the mathematical modeling of ion channels. Ion channels are proteins with a hole down their middle and serve an important function as gatekeepers for cells.

The project also has an educational component that integrates Wang’s research activities with training of students at all levels, from K-12 through graduate students, with a focus on serving underrepresented minorities.