17/05/2023
14th December, 2022 : Career Talk - 01 with Alumnus Dr Mahesh Sunkula
On this day, we conducted an interview with Dr. Mahesh Sunkula, with interviewers being Samyak and Suhanee. Dr Sunkula was a student of the first batch of IISER Bhopal and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University, USA.
Before moving to Purdue, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Riverside. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Oklahoma, Norman, under the supervision of Dr. Nikola Petrov. In 2013, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal with a BS-MS dual degree in Mathematics, where he carried out his MS thesis under the supervision of Dr Nikita Agarwal on “Stability analysis of Switched Coupled Dynamical Systems”.
His research is in applied mathematics, on the intersection of Mathematical Physics, Hamiltonian Dynamics and Symplectic Geometry. He has worked on research projects related to inverse problems, wave scattering, optimal control, and quantization. His other interests include Mathematical Biology, Stochastic Processes, and Data Assimilation.
We talked about careers in mathematics, interdisciplinary research and his experience in academia.
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“Regarding the fundamental investigations of mathematics, there is no final ending... no first beginning.” - Felix Klein