Post-Doctoral and Faculty Exchange Program


Post-doctoral and faculty exchange

In order to build a successful UT-Austin Portugal Cooperative Program in Mathematics there needs to be a strong component of joint research at junior and senior levels.

Accordingly, it is proposed to have a regular exchange of post-doc and junior faculty as well senior faculty to organize workshops to foster the development of common research interests and projects.

In order to pursue the internationalization of Portuguese universities it is essential to have a post-doc and junior faculty exchange program. Such a program would attract talented recent graduates and junior faculty from UT-Austin to Portugal as well as send to Austin recent Portuguese graduates and junior faculty. In Portugal and at UT-Austin post-doctoral and junior faculty positions would be funded by the UT-Austin Portugal Program and post-docs would be expected to have a reduced teaching load. Furthermore, in order to foster joint research enterprise at the senior level yearly workshops will be organized alternating between Austin, Coimbra and Lisbon.


Post-doctoral fellows

  • Maria Teresa Perez Llanos
  • Maria Teresa Perez
  • Farid Bozorgnia
  • Stefania Patrizi
  • Gabriele Terrone
  • Gabriele Terrone
  • Filippo Cagnetti

Post doctoral positions funded through projects

  • Surya Prasath Vellai Badradoss - one year, from January 01 to December 2011
  • Sunil Kumar - one year: starting date June 2012
  • Verena Hagspiel
  • Raimundo Leitão - starts September 1, 2012

Faculty exchange

Here we list the visits from Portuguese faculty to UT Austin for long periods, i.e., more than a month.

Visiting Faculty 2010/11

Prof. Daniel Abreu (as a senior postdoctoral researcher) Department of Mathematics, FCTUC UT collaborator: Professor John E. Gilbert ICES, UT Austin Prof. Luís Daniel Abreu (Univ. of Coimbra) visited again the University of Texas Austin in February 2011 (for two weeks) with the main purpose of continuing the collaborating with Prof. John Gilbert (Univ. Texas Austin) in Applied Harmonic Analysis. They have now finished the paper Contraction of Gabor frames to the interval (-1,1), preprint 11-07, Dept. Mathematics, Univ. Coimbra, 2011, which has been submitted for publication in a scientific journal. With the purpose of increasing the potential impact of this research, the current visit to the United States included two invited talks delivered by Prof. Abreu at major scientific institutions: Gabor and wavelet (super)frames with Hermite and Laguerre functions, presented at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU, 2010, Time-frequency analysis of Bergman-type spaces, presented at the Center for Constructive Approximation, Vanderbilt University, 2010.

Prof. António Salgueiro (as a senior postdoctoral researcher) Department of Mathematics, FCTUC UT collaborator: John Luecke Department of Mathematics, UT Austin Professors António Salgueiro (Univ. of Coimbra) and John Luecke (Univ. Texas at Austin) continued the collaboration started last year, in the area of geometric topology under the UT Austin Portugal collaboration program. Professor António Salgueiro visited Austin from April 3 to May 13, 2011. They studied the cyclic coverings of knots and links in S^3 and they proved that two coverings of different degrees of a given nontrivial link are nonhomeomorphic. A paper describing these results is currently in preparation.

Prof. Margarida Melo and Dr. Filippo Viviani (as senior postdoctoral researchers) Department of Mathematics, FCTUC UT collaborator: Sean Keel Department of Mathematics, UT Austin Prof. Margarida Melo (Univ. of Coimbra) and Dr. Filippo Viviani (Univ. of Coimbra/Univ. of Roma Tre) started a collaboration with Prof. Sean Keel (Univ. Texas at Austin) in the area of algebraic geometry under the UT Austin | Portugal collaboration program. Prof. Margarida Melo and Dr. Filippo visited Austin from August 23 to September 4, 2011 to work with Prof. Sean Keel. They studied tropical compactifications of the moduli space of curves embedded in the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties via the Torelli morphism. Using methods from tropical geometry and toroidal compactifications of quotients of locally symmetric domains, they expect to be able to prove that the moduli space of curves is hubsh, i.e., that there exists a minimal tropical compactification and that all the other tropical compactifications are a refinement of the minimal one. The minimal tropical compactification should be given by the modular compactification of the Torelli map, studied by Alexeev and by Caporaso-Viviani. As a corollary of this result, it would follow that the above compactified Torelli morphism is the unique extension of the Torelli morphism from the moduli space of stable curves to any toroidal compactification of the moduli space of abelian varieties.

Prof. Isabel Figueiredo has visited UT Austin between August 27 to October 02, 2010 to continue ongoing research activities.

Visiting Faculty 2009/10

Two Visiting Research Fellows from FCTUC visited the Department of Mathematics and the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) during the fourth year of the program supported by FCTUC.

Prof. Daniel Abreu (as a senior postdoctoral researcher) Department of Mathematics, FCTUC UT collaborator: Professor John E. Gilbert ICES, UT Austin Professors Luís Daniel Abreu (Univ. of Coimbra) and John Gilbert (Univ. Texas Austin) started a collaboration on the area of Mathematical Signal Analysis, more precisely on "Harmonic Analysis on contractions of the phase plane", within the Mathematics section of the UT Austin | Portugal program. For this purpose, Prof. Abreu had visited Austin in July 2009 and returned, this year, in January 2010. The two researchers are applying the representation theory of the contractions of the Heisenberg group to the construction of frames, by using methods from Complex and Harmonic Analysis. The theoretical results may lead to new implementable algorithms for the analysis and synthesis of signals supported on compact sets. The outcome of this research is expected to promote a transference of knowledge between the Mathematics and Communications Engineering communities involved in the UT Austin | Portugal program.

Prof. António Salgueiro (as a senior postdoctoral researcher) Department of Mathematics, FCTUC UT collaborator: John Luecke Department of Mathematics, UT Austin Professors António Salgueiro (Univ. of Coimbra) and John Luecke (Univ. Texas at Austin) started a collaboration in the area of geometric topology under the UT Austin | Portugal collaboration program. Professor António Salgueiro visited Austin from August 13 to 24, 2010 to work with Professor John Luecke. They studied the cyclic coverings of knots and links using the JSJ decomposition of 3-manifolds and methods from hyperbolic geometry, Seifert fibred space theory, and graph theory. In particular, they expect to understand if all coverings of different degrees of a given nontrivial link are nonhomeomorphic.

Finally, the PI of the program in FCTUC and his national co-director in the area of Mathematics (Prof. Luis Nunes Vicente) visited the Department of Mathematics and ICES UT Austin in February 2010 to further discuss future activities and prepare the 2011 event (Summer school and workshop) in Optimization in Machine Learning.

Visiting Faculty 2008/09

During the academic year 2008/09, both Isabel Figueiredo (UCoimbra) and Sílvia Barbeiro (UCoimbra) have visited UT for extended periods to continue the research work started on the previous year.

Prof. Sílvia Barbeiro (as a postdoctoral researcher) Department of Mathematics, FCTUC UT collaborators: Professor Mary F. Wheeler The Center for Subsurface Modeling, ICES, UT Austin Research interests within this collaboration include the numerical solution of partial differential systems applied to coupled geomechanics and reservoir flow models. We give special attention to stress-sensitive reservoir problems. This work will focus on deriving superconvergence results for mean stress to be used in the computation of permeability for poro-elasticity. Here we are combining a mixed finite element for Darcy flow and Galerkin finite element for elasticity. The grids for the two discrete approximations need not be the same. Applications of interest include well productivity and subsidence in petroleum reservoir engineering and carbon sesquestration in geological formations.

UT Austin Mathematics also hosted Prof. Isabel Narra de Figueiredo. She received travel support from her home institution, but the UT Mathematics CoLab funding provided local living expenses. Prof. Figueiredo’s research is on Aberrant Crypt Foci: mathematical analysis and endoscopic image processing. It involves the collaboration of medical doctors from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra, and the Hospital of the University of Coimbra. This research focuses on modeling and medical imaging, and the goal is to assist doctors in terms of the diagnosis, the prevention and the treatment of colorectal cancer.

Visiting Faculty 2007/08

Eugénio Rocha (UAveiro), Sílvia Barbeiro (UCoimbra), and Juha Videman (IST) are at UT Austin developing their research. They are working together with some of the CoLab@Austin faculty in the Mathematics department and at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (ICES). Isabel Figueiredo (UCoimbra) was at UT Austin in October 2007 and January/February 2008 to establish collaborations in the framework of a new biomathematics and medical imaging research project.

Eugénio Rocha is collaborating with Luis Caffarelli (CoLab@Austin Mathematics Director) in the study of the theoretical issues concerning subelliptic operators and (fractional) Laplacians evolving in Carnot groups (a subclass of nilpotent Lie groups). Sílvia is working with Mary F. Wheeler, from ICES, and her interests are in the field of numerical solution of partial differential systems applied to coupled geomechanics and reservoir flow models.

Isabel Figueiredo was at the University of Texas in Austin in October 2007 and January/February 2008 developing research in the framework of the project "Aberrant Crypt Foci: mathematical analysis and endoscopic image processing". This research project of Isabel Figueiredo started in January 2007 at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Coimbra http://www.mat.uc.pt/~cmuc/lcm/endoscopic.html and involves the collaboration of several mathematicians of the University of Coimbra and doctors from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra, and the Hospital of the University of Coimbra. The research focuses in modeling and medical imaging, and the goal is to assist doctors in terms of the diagnosis, the prevention and the treatment of colorectal cancer. In October 2007 and January / February 2008, Isabel started a collaboration with the University of Texas in Austin, involving Omar Ghattas (ICES) and Georg Stadler (ICES) (for optimization), Chandrajit Bajaj (ICES) (for visualization and computation), Bjorn Engquist (ICES) and Richard Tsai (ICES) (for multiscale methods and level set methods).

Juha Videman was in residence at UT Austin between January and May 2008. Juha Videman is pursuing research in collaboration with Clint Dawson, from ICES, and Brian Arbic, from UT Institute for Geographics, in partial differential equations in geophysical fluid dynamics.

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