Mathematics Dept Faculty Member Receives NSF Grant for Research in Partial Diff EQ

Pablo Raúl Stinga receives NSF Grant for research in partial differential equations and fractional nonlocal equations

The Department of Mathematics is pleased to announce that Professor Pablo Raúl Stinga has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award totaling $240,000 in support of his research project “Problems in Local and Fractional Elliptic Partial Differential Equations Involving Surfaces” (Award #2606349).

The grant will support Professor Stinga’s research for the next three years. In addition to its scientific contributions, the grant will also fund the training and development of graduate students and foster collaborations with researchers at institutions across the United States.

Professor Stinga’s project focuses on fundamental questions in the analysis and applications of partial differential equations (PDEs) and fractional nonlocal PDEs, branches of mathematics that are central in a wide range of applied areas such as climate science, engineering, materials science, image processing, epidemiology, and data science.

The research will investigate both local and nonlocal (fractional) mathematical models. Unlike local models, where behavior depends primarily on nearby conditions, nonlocal models capture situations in which events occurring far away can immediately influence the system. Such long-range interactions are central to modern models of climate processes, disease transmission, population dynamics, plasma physics, viscoelastic materials, and social networks. A key challenge addressed by the project is understanding how these interactions behave near boundaries, interfaces, and surfaces. Real-world examples include the interaction between land and ocean temperatures across a coastline or the behavior of different materials joined together at a common interface. Professor Stinga’s advances will provide rigorous mathematical foundations for computational methods used in surface design, image reconstruction, and data interpolation, and will contribute to the development of more reliable simulation tools and artificial intelligence algorithms that depend on accurate mathematical models.

The Department of Mathematics congratulates Professor Pablo Raúl Stinga on this prestigious NSF award and looks forward to the many advances in mathematical research, student mentorship, and interdisciplinary collaboration that will emerge from this project.