Meet New Cal Poly Math Faculty
The Math Department has hired several new faculty, including Cierra Street (pictured).
The Mathematics Department has added four new faculty members, a postdoctoral fellow and a postdoctoral research scholar, with a wide range of backgrounds and areas of specialization.
Meet the department’s new additions below:
Austin Christian, Assistant Professor
Christian joined the department in fall 2024, following a visiting faculty position at Georgia Institute of Technology. Before that, he received a Ph.D. from UCLA. Austin’s research specialty is contact and symplectic topology, and he is excited to join the active group of geometry and topology faculty at Cal Poly. Outside of math, Austin enjoys his hobbies ¾ reading, cycling, running and food.
Saba Gerami, Assistant Professor
Gerami’s research focuses on the complexity of mathematics instruction in undergraduate classrooms, especially in inquiry-oriented learning environments. She is passionate about understanding how instructors design meaningful tasks and how students engage with those tasks.
Originally from Tehran, Iran, Saba immigrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of 18. She began her college education at Santa Monica College before transferring to UCLA, where she discovered her love for learning mathematics. She went on to earn her master’s degree in mathematics from Cal Poly and then taught a range of courses at both Cal Poly and Allan Hancock Community College. After several years of teaching, she pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan’s School of Education. Through it all, Saba knew she had to find her way back to the gorgeous Central Coast and the Cal Poly community that first inspired her to become an educator.
Outside of academia, Saba enjoys cooking and trying new foods, drinking very light or very dark beer, traveling and making friends around the world, reading graphic novels, learning about mental health, and spending time with her partner and their very good dog, Hagrid.
Jackson Goodman, Assistant Professor
Goodman received a bachelor’s from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Wolfgang Ziller. He then held positions as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley and a visiting assistant professor at Colby College in Maine before joining the Cal Poly faculty in 2024.
His research is in differential geometry, specifically the interactions between the global topology of a shape and its curvature, often illuminated by the study of Dirac operators. Outside of math he enjoys hiking, biking, wildlife, and coffee.
Alex Ruys de Perez, Frost Postdoctoral Fellow
Ruys de Perez received his bachelor’s in 2013 and his master’s in 2015 from Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M in 2021, co-advised by Anne Shiu and Laura Matusevich. From 2021-2024, he was part of the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology at Georgia Tech, where his research consisted of applying topological data analysis and machine learning to understand how pluripotent stem cell colonies self-organize. He is now a Frost Postdoctoral Fellow at Cal Poly, where he is working with Elena Dimitrova and Joyce Lin to model signaling in cardiac tissue. His research interests lie in the field of mathematical biology, particular in regards to applications of algebra, geometry, and topology.
Terrin Warren, Frost Postdoctoral Research Scholar
Warren is working with Assistant Professor Patrick Orson. She earned her bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Georgia. Her research is in low-dimensional topology, with particular interest in diffeomorphisms of 4-manifolds and knotted surfaces. Before coming to Cal Poly, she was involved in mentoring undergraduates and organizing outreach events to make mathematics more accessible for all. She looks forward to continuing this work through the Frost Summer Research Program. Warren enjoys the Central Coast’s hills, sunshine and the great weather.
Ciera Street, Assistant Professor
Ciera Street received her bachelor's at William and Mary in Virginia, her master's from the University of Northern Colorado, and her doctorate from Colorado State University (each degree was in math). She specializes in undergraduate mathematics education, researching ways to create more equitable undergraduate mathematics spaces by focusing on how gendered and racialized mathematical values interact with women and student of color's experiences in undergraduate and graduate mathematics. In her free time, she likes to explore new places in SLO, read, crochet, and go thrifting.
