Professor Jeff Calder awarded Al and Dorothy Marden Professorship

MINNESOTA / ST. PAUL (4/21/2023) – The School of Mathematics Endowed Chairs and Professors Committee has awarded Associate Professor Jeff Calder the Al and Dorothy Marden Professorship. The five-year appointment begins in Fall 2023 and will provide annual funding to support Calder’s research at the University of Minnesota.

Calder joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 2016 as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. His research is focused on interactions between partial differential equations, numerical analysis, applied probability, and computer science. 

This interest in interdisciplinary research spans many application areas. Calder and fellow College of Science and Engineering faculty members Zhi-Ling Zhang and Rajesh Rajamani were featured in the Fall 2022 edition of Inventing Tomorrow for their InterS&Ections seed grant project that aims to pave the way for smarter and safer autonomous vehicles. Calder also notably engages in interdisciplinary research through his role as a cofounder of the Anthropological and Mathematical Analysis of Archaeological and Zooarchaeological Evidence (AMAAZE) consortium, which hosts collaborations of mathematicians, computer scientists and archaeologists. A recurring theme of his work is the continuum limit of inherently discrete optimization problems in the analysis of large data, which informs understanding and quantitative analysis of algorithms such as the Google page rank strategy. 

Previous recognition for Calder’s commitment to research and education includes the McKnight Presidential Fellowship and the University of Minnesota Guillermo E. Borja Award in 2021, as well as the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics in 2020.

The Al and Dorothy Marden Professorship is endowed by Professor Emeritus Albert Marden and his wife, Dorothy. Calder is the second recipient of this award; Professor Tyler Lawson was the inaugural recipient in 2021.