While pretty much everyone in my circle of association is a collaborator, this is especially true of my PhD students whose dissertations are always close collaborations with me and,, quite frequently, others. As a result, they leave my group fully prepared for the reality of life as a collaborator. Usually they are also well prepared computationally, since my (non-student) collaborators are usually computationally skilled. In addition to the students listed in the student and alumni sections, here are my other frequent collaborators (the order of listing below is not significant):
Bala Krishnamoorthy: An expert in optimization and computational methods for modeling, Bala has collaborated closely with me on the research for 3 PhD dissertations — those of Sharif Ibrahim, Yunfeng Hu and Enrique Alvarado and are again collaborating on research that is part of our current student’s dissertation work. Bala has also started playying a more central role in the iSciMath project. Bala’s website is here.
Gary Sandine: Gary and I were students at Portland State University a long time ago, when he was beginning to work on a Masters degree and I was about to go off to Los Alamos to work on my dissertation. A couple of years later I managed to find a way to bring him to Los Alamos and that began a collaboration off and on that has continued for about 20 years. Gary is now an Associate Director in OIT and the CISO at PSU in Portland. He and I have worked on mathematically focused contract work for industry that includes building research teams.
Richard Smith: Richard and I entered the PhD program at PSU at the same time, about 24 years ago. We formed a small group with a few other students that dreamed of building a team that created cool stuff together. While we did go our separate ways a couple of years later, we stayed in touch through the years and after Richard’s company Tradesmith made it possible for him to aim at a new level of algorithmic development, he contacted me and I took a year sabbatical to help kick off that effort for his company. Richard is now working on his third startup company. The website of the company he founded and recently sold is here.
Patrick Campbell: was only 14 or 15 when I first met him, when I was running his uncle’s physiology lab in Neurosurgery (the lab was focused on microcirculation) and starting to think about going back to graduate school. Over the years, Patrick spent time with my team at Los Alamos and showed up fairly frequently for deep conversations about all sorts of things. For example, one time we spent a couple of days in a Christmas time, week-long visit re-deriving the equations that describe black holes because that is what he was interested in at the time. He eventually finished a PhD in mathematics at the University of Minnesota. Now he lives in Seattle, and after working at Multiscale Health Systems as a data scientist for a number of years, decided to becme a freelance data scientist. Here is his Linkedin page.
Michael Forbes: is a theoretical physicist, Associate Professor WSU and affiliate professor in the UW nuclear theory group. He and I, with strong support from Bala and about 10 others, spearheaded a collection of new projects gathered in a new group, the Complexity, Data and Learning Group (CDLG) at WSU. In a nutshell, we were aiming for a new, updated version of Bell Labs, at WSU. Here is a white paper describing the CDLG and a short one-pager that described this project. Due to the shut down in 2020, we refocused our energy on a slightly smaller project, the Integrated Science and Mathematics (iSciMath) project that is now ramping up again. Michael and I are also beginning to collaborate on each others core research projects as well. His website is here.
The photo above is a team I assembled in collaboration with Richard Smith to work on some algorithmic challenges. The photo was taken by Mark Meyers.