Professor Michael Holst

Michael Holst is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at UC San Diego, and holds a Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair. He works in numerical analysis, applied analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics. He grew up in Colorado, earned a B.S. from Colorado State University in 1987, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1993. He was a von Karman Instructor and Prize Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics at Caltech from 1993-1997, and was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at UC Irvine from 1997-1998, before moving to UC San Diego in 1998. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a Hellman Fellowship, and is coauthor of two graduate textbooks on applied analysis and partial differential equations with Ivar Stakgold.

Michael directs the Mathematical and Computational Physics Research Group (MCP) within the Mathematics and Physics Departments at UCSD, and is the lead developer and architect of the Finite Element ToolKit (FETK). He serves as Co-Director for the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCoM) within the Mathematics Department, and co-directs the interdisciplinary M.S. and Ph.D. Programs in Computational Science, Mathematics, and Engineering (CSME) that span a number of departments at UCSD. He is involved in a number of interdisciplinary research and training programs on campus, including the BioCircuits Institute (BCI), the NIH National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR), and the NSF Physics Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP). His research is supported by NSF, NIH, DOE, AFOSR, and DTRA, as well as by industrial sponsors and private foundations. While at UCSD he has been the primary supervisor for more than thirty doctoral and postdoctoral students, as well as more than a dozen undergraduate honors thesis students and REU summer research students.

The navigation bar to the left has links to more detailed information about Michael's research and education activities.

In January 2013, we will be running a UCSD workshop and jointly organizing a related multi-part minisymposium at the JMM Conference at the San Diego Convention Center; see the GPDE2013 website for more information about the workshop and the JMM minisymposium.
During the 2012-2013 academic year we will periodically run a campus-wide CSME Seminar, with about one lecture a month (at times more or less frequently), covering a broad range of topics in applied mathematics, physical sciences, and computational science. Speakers will include both UCSD faculty as well as visiting faculty from other institutions. The seminar titles and abstracts will be posted on the CCoM/CSME Seminar website and will also be announced on the CSME-L mailing list. For information about getting onto the CSME-L and related email lists, see the MCP group webpage.
During the 2011-2012 academic year we will run a Reading Course/Seminar Series in the overlapping areas of mathematical and numerical general relativity. There will be about 6-8 talks spread throughout the Fall quarter, with a few additional seminars in the Spring quarter. For the schedule of talks, see the MNGR Seminar Series webpage. We are also running a related UCSD workshop and multi-part minisymposium at the SIAM PDE Conference in November; see the GPDE2011 website. In May 2012, we will hold the Southern California Analysis and Partial Differential Equations Conference (SCAPDE) at UCSD, with a focus on mathematical and numerical general relativity; see the SCAPDE website.
In July 2011 NSF announced that a collaborative team, led by UCSD and with supporting teams at Caltech and Colorado State University, had received a $1.1M NSF Focussed Research Group (FRG) Award. The FRG funding award will allow the team to tackle several open problems in mathematical and numerical general relativity, the solutions of which could have impact on gravitational wave simulation efforts (such as LIGO, VIRGO, and other gravity wave detection devices). UCSD is the lead institution in the FRG project; UCSD Mathematicans Michael Holst (PI) and Melvin Leok (Co-PI) lead the UCSD portion of the project. For more information about the project, see the announcement on the NSF Website.
In June 2010 the source code tree for the entire FETK Project was released under the GNU LGPL (GNU Library General Public License). For more information about FETK, see the FETK Website.
In Spring 2008, the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCoM) was founded as a UC-designated Research Center at UC San Diego. The Center was formed by a group of UCSD faculty with common interests in the areas of computational and applied mathematics, and is supported by the UCSD Division of Physical Sciences and by funding awards of the individual CCoM Faculty. CCoM faculty, together with other UCSD faculty and faculty at other institutions, have organized and co-organized a sequence of regional, national, and international workshops and conferences over the last several years, including:
- REB60: Workshop on Adaptive and Multilevel Methods for PDE (November 2009)
- PCGM26: 26th Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting (March 2010)
- SI2010: 6th Annual Structured Integrators Workshop (April 2010)
- DD20: 20th International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods (February 2011)
- RPCCT2011: Rough Paths and Combinatorics in Control Theory (July 2011)
- GPDE2011: Geometric Numerical Methods for PDE (November 2011)
- SCAPDE: Southern California Analysis and PDE Conference (May 2012)
- GPDE2013: Geometric Numerical Methods for PDE (January 2013)
In Fall 2007 (PhD) and Fall 2010 (MS), the CSME Graduate Program was officially launched by UCSD. Complete information about the new CSME Graduate Programs, which are the first degree-granting Computational Science Graduate Programs in the UC System, can be found on the CSME Website.