News

Department of Mathematics Assistant Professor Sara Pollock has received a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support ongoing research.

The NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the awards to early-career faculty who “have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” NSF explains that the goal of the CAREER Program is to “build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”

Pollock’s research will focus on developing “efficient, robust and theoretically sound technologies that will accelerate convergence to solutions of matrix and tensor eigenvalue problems.” She was awarded $424,335 via a continuing grant which is expected to conclude in August 2026.

In an abstract, Pollock explains that eigenvalue problems “arise naturally throughout many areas of mathematics and data science, and their numerical solution is crucial for understanding the behavior of many complex systems.” Some of these systems include structural mechanics, epidemiology, image processing, medical imaging, search-engine technology and more.

In addition, responding to the huge increase in remote learning over the past year, Pollock will also develop stand-alone apps to aid in the delivery of topics in numerical analysis and linear algebra that are closely related to her research.

“The outcomes of this research will be efficient, low-memory solution methods that will have a wide range of applications to computational problems in the physical and biological sciences,” Pollock said. “I look forward to working with students and to developing interdisciplinary collaborations with other CLAS researchers in the years ahead.”