Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Five SoM faculty will receive promotions, with successful promotions at all levels. 

Michael Damron, Promoted to Full Professor

Dr. Michael Damron came to Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in 2015 and became an Associate Professor in 2017. Prof. Damron's research is in probability theory, with interests in percolation and particle systems and with research supported by an NSF grant and an NSF CAREER award. Some examples of the random growth models studied by Prof. Damron include bacterial or tumor spread, and fluid flow through porous media. 

Prof. Damron is a Kavli fellow (National Academy of Sciences) since 2019, and the organizer of several conferences including Mathematics Research Communities (2019) and Recent Trends in Continuous and Discrete Probability (2018). Prof. Damron is also a mentor to many past and current postdocs and graduate students including two current Ph.D. students and one postdoc.

Josephine Yu, Promoted to Full Professor 

Dr. Josephine Yu first joined SoM in 2010 as an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow and became an Assistant Professor the following year. Prof. Yu's research lies in the area of Tropical Algebraic Geometry and its applications to combinatorics, matroid theory, and analytic and computational geometry, and since arriving at Tech her work has been continually supported by the NSF. Prof. Yu has organized many conferences since 2011 including the Meeting on Applied Algebraic Geometry in 2019, and the Computational Tropical Geometry Minisymposium at the SIAM Algebraic Geometry meeting in 2017. Prof. Yu was also the Program co-chair of SIAM AG21 and has served on the Advisory Board of MEGA (Effective Methods in Algebraic Geometry) since 2019.

Prof. Yu is also currently an Editor for two journals, Combinatorial Theory and Algebraic Statistics (AStat), is the Associate Editor for the Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry (JSAG), and was the Editor in Chief for the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A (JCTA) from 2018 until 2020.

In addition to her impressive research and organizational work, Prof. Yu has mentored three graduate students and two masters students including award winning graduate students Cvetelina Hill and Marcel Celaya. 

Mayya Zhilova, Promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure

Dr. Mayya Zhilova began work at the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech in 2016, and is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech and the Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science (TRIAD). Prof. Zhilova's research interests lie in the areas of mathematical statistics, statistical learning theory, and uncertainty quantification, particularly in statistical inference for complex high-dimensional data, performance of resampling procedures for various classes of problems, functional estimation, and inference for misspecified models. Prof. Zhilova was awarded an NSF CAREER award in 2021 with a project which seeks to address challenging open questions in high-dimensional and nonparametric statistics motivated by practical applications in finance, engineering, and life sciences. 

Sal Barone, Promoted to Senior Academic Professional

Dr. Sal Barone first arrived at Georgia Tech in 2013 as a Hale Postdoctoral Fellow doing research in Real Algebraic Geometry, and became the school's first Director of Communications (DoCSoM) as an Academic Professional in 2017. With a clear passion for teaching, Dr. Barone has contributed to the service mission of SoM by coordinating Math 1554 Linear Algebra since Spring 2020, and has been the course coordinator for Math 1552 Calculus II as well as the lead instructor for nearly all the first year courses offered in SoM.

As part of his role as DoCSoM, Dr. Barone designs and publishes the yearly ProofReader magazine which features the goings-on of the renowned faculty and phenomenal students here in SoM. Dr. Barone also manages the SoM website and intranet content, and is the chair of the CDO committee which helps to organize the periodic Stelson Lecture Series.  

Neha Gupta, Promoted to Senior Academic Professional

Dr. Neha Gupta came to SoM in 2018 as Director of Scheduling and an Academic Professional. Dr. Gupta has taught several service level courses such as Math 1712 Survey of Calculus and GT1000, and has been the course coordinator for Math 1551 since Fall 2018. 

Dr. Gupta has received several teaching awards including the CoS Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Honor Roll in 2022 and the CIOS Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award in 2020. Dr. Gupta also serves as an academic advisor for math majors, and so interacts with some of the most diverse groups of students on campus. Dr. Gupta was also the first Academic Professional to fill the recently appointed AP position on the Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) for the School of Mathematics.