Rice mathematician Gillman named Sloan Research Fellow

Rice University’s Adrianna Gillman wins prestigious honor for early career scientists

Adrianna Gillman, assistant professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University, has been selected as a 2016 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Mathematics.

Gillman is one of 126 new Sloan fellows announced today by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The prestigious fellowships, awarded annually since 1955, include a generous grant to support the work of early career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential mark them as rising stars.

Adrianna Gillman

Gillman said the Sloan grant will support her research into developing fast and reliable computational techniques for solving linear partial differential equations (PDEs).

“I’m interested in developing numerical and mathematical techniques that can better model physical phenomena,” she said. “These have applications in many areas, including gas and oil, sonar and radar, imaging and remote sensing, and blood flow.”

Gillman’s research includes scientific computing, numerical methods for linear PDEs and numerical linear algebra. She develops “fast” algorithms such as the Fast Multipole Method and rank-structured fast linear algebraic solvers (fast direct solvers), high-order discretizations and integral equation formulations for the mathematical modeling of physics and other real-world applications.

Gillman earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from California State University, Northridge, in 2003 and 2006, respectively, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. Before joining the Rice faculty in 2014, she was a John Wesley Young Research Instructor in Mathematics at Dartmouth College.

Gillman said she is still assembling her research group, which will include a postdoctoral researcher and two graduate students in computational and applied mathematics.

—Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering