Benjamin Ong Awarded 2019-2020 Kliakhandler Fellowship

The purpose of the Kliakhandler Fellowship is to stimulate research activity in the Michigan Tech Department of Mathematics. Awarded annually, the Kliakhandler Fellow is chosen based on a record of excellence in research and the potential of the proposed workshop to stimulate further research achievements and bring visibility to Michigan Tech and the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

Ong, along with Jacob B. Schroder, assistant professor in the Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics at University of New Mexico, is organizing two conferences to take place at Michigan Tech in June 2020. The first, “The CBMS Conference – Parallel Time Integration,” will take place June 1-5, 2020. The focus of this parallel-in-time workshop is to educate and inspire researchers and students in new and innovative numerical techniques for the parallel-in-time solution of large-scale evolution problems on modern supercomputing architectures, and to stimulate further studies in their analysis and applications.  The conference will feature ten lectures by Professor Martin Gander, an expert in parallel time integration and a professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

The second conference, 9th Workshop on Parallel-in-Time Integration,” takes place June 8-12, 2020. The workshop the workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts to disseminate cutting-edge research and facilitate scientific discussions on the field of parallel time integration methods.

Igor Kliakhandler, a former Michigan Technological University mathematics faculty member, was born in Moscow, Russia in 1966. He graduated from the Moscow Oil and Gas Institute in 1983 and started his PhD studies there in 1988. He then emigrated with his family to Israel in 1991 and began his PhD at Tel-Aviv University under the guidance of Gregory Sivashinsky. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1997 from Tel-Aviv University. He held positions at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University before joining Michigan Tech’s Department of Mathematical Sciences as an assistant professor in 2001. He was promoted to associate professor in 2005 and left the University in 2007 to work in the energy sector in Houston. He manages a group of companies that trade electric power across US, and is involved in a few start-up projects. Igor remained fond of Michigan Tech and its Math Department. Kliakhandler provides a generous gift to host the Kliakhandler Conference, an annual event at Michigan Tech to stimulate research activity in the mathematical sciences.