Letter from the Chair 2025
Alumni and Friends of the Mathematics Department,
It’s been another busy year here in the Cal Poly Mathematics Department! As has been the case in the past several newsletters, the first thing of note is the many new faces you’ll see if you drop in for a visit as we were joined this Fall by three new tenure track faculty members.
The first, Dr. Saba Gerami, comes to us by way of our own Master’s program (class of 2015) then a stint as a part-time-time lecturer until she started her graduate work at the University of Michigan in 2017. Dr. Gerami earned her Ph.D. from Michigan in Mathematics Education in 2024 under Vilma Mesa, and we’re extremely pleased to welcome her back. Her research seeks to understand interactive methods of teaching mathematics at the college level. In particular, she studies what occurs in postsecondary mathematics classrooms through an examination of the ways in which inquiry is operationalized across instructors by focusing on their decision-making at different stages of teaching.
Second, is Dr. Austin Christian. Dr. Christian earned his Master’s degree from the University of Texas at Tyler in 2015, his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UCLA in 2021 under Ko Honda while moonlighting at Pepperdine as an adjunct instructor during the summers, and then completed a postdoc at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His area of expertise is the topology of contact and symplectic manifolds, the spaces designed to serve as the appropriate setting for Hamiltonian mechanics.
Third is Dr. Jackson Goodman. Dr. Goodman earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania under Wolfgang Ziller in 2020. After an NSF postdoc at UC Berkeley, he taught at Colby College in Maine before making the move to California. Dr. Goodman studies the geometry and topology of Riemannian manifolds and orbifolds satisfying positive and nonnegative curvature conditions.
Special thanks goes out to Dr. Danielle Champney for successfully chairing the Math Ed screening committee whose recommendation led to Dr. Gerami’s hire and to Dr. Dylan Retsek who similarly chaired the Pure Math screening committee resulting in the hiring of Drs. Christian and Goodman.
These are just the new faculty that have already arrived on campus. This past fall/winter/spring we also searched for several tenure track and full-time lecturer positions. Dr. Paul Choboter chaired the screening committee for our applied faulty search. We’re pleased to announce that Dr. Daniel Cruz and Dr. Hervé Nganguia will be joining us as assistant professors in Fall 2025 and 2026 respectively, Dr. Cruz from a Postdoc at the University of Florida and Dr. Nganguia from Towson University in Maryland. We will also welcome a new full-time lecturer in Fall 2025, Dr. Chistopher Eblen, who just finished his Ph.D at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Watch this space next year for complete introductions when these three arrive on campus.
So it’s been a busy, but very rewarding year. In the midst of all this hiring, the department has been maintaining the mathematical life and educational mission of the department, offering rich coursework, abundant student research opportunities, and maintaining our own research programs. In May we had the honor of hosting the American Mathematical Society Western Sectional Meeting which was attended by many current and former students several of whom gave talks or presented posters. Throughout the year, we have been able to supervise (and fund) a significant amount of student travel to mathematical research conferences. This latter activity, one of the many made possible by your generosity, constitutes an incredibly powerful and formative experience for budding mathematicians and we are immensely awed, humble, and grateful for your support.
Please keep in touch and let us know what you’ve been up to. We'd love to see you at the department office if you're ever on campus.
Sincerely,
Ben Richert, Chair, Mathematics Department
