Department of Mathematics Welcomes New Faculty for 2025-26 Academic Year
09-23-2025
The Department of Mathematics is proud to welcome eight new faculty members whose expertise strengthens the department’s teaching, research and outreach. Their diverse scholarship and global experiences will expand opportunities for Purdue students and advance discovery across a wide range of mathematical fields.
Ernest Aboagye joins Purdue as a senior lecturer (75% Mathematics, 25% Statistics) from Georgia State University’s Greenberg School of Risk Science, where he earned a PhD in risk management and insurance. His research develops advanced statistical tools for Value-at-Risk forecasting and actuarial risk analysis, with publications in the European Journal of Operational Research and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. Aboagye’s work advances quantitative methods for managing volatility, systemic risk and reinsurance design. With professional experience as an actuary, he looks forward to combining teaching and research to prepare the next generation of risk professionals.
Ajay Chandra, joining Purdue as an associate professor, studies stochastic partial differential equations and mathematical questions around quantum field theory. He earned his PhD at the University of Virginia, followed by postdoctoral work at Warwick and Imperial College London, and later served on the faculty at Imperial. Chandra’s research develops mathematical tools to study systems with infinitely many random degrees of freedom, often involving concepts from physics such as renormalization.
Shimeng Huang joins Purdue as a tenure-track assistant professor of actuarial science with a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics (75%) and the Department of Mathematics (25%). She earned her PhD in insurance economics and actuarial analytics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores the intersection of climate risk, catastrophic events, insurance analytics, machine learning and dependence modeling.
Zhilin Luo joins Purdue as a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematics. He earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Minnesota and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago. His research lies at the interface of representation theory, automorphic forms and the Langlands program, with a focus on Fourier analysis on spherical varieties, trace formulas and applications to L-functions.
Shubhodip Mondal joins Purdue as a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematics. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan. Before joining Purdue, he held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Mondal’s research focuses on arithmetic geometry and homotopy theory.
Thi Hanh Vo joins Purdue as an assistant professor of practice in mathematics. She earned her PhD at the University of Luxembourg and previously served as a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University. Her research centers on hyperbolic geometry and low-dimensional topology.
Yash Lodha joins the Purdue Mathematics department as a tenured Associate professor. He earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 2015. His area of expertise lies in Topology and Geometric group theory. He studies groups of homeomorphisms of some fundamental mathematical spaces such as the Cantor space and manifolds in low dimension. His research is supported by an NSF CAREER award DMS-2552707.
Siamak Yassemi has joined Purdue University in Indianapolis as an associate professor of practice in mathematics. He earned his PhD from the University of Copenhagen and previously served as a professor at the University of Tehran. Yassemi has held research affiliations with leading institutions worldwide, including the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute in Berkeley, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste and the Hanoi Institute of Mathematics. Most recently, he was a visiting faculty member at Purdue and the Shelly Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Also joining the department as visiting faculty: Reinhold Hübl, Esen Aksoy, Alexandra Cuadra, Can Cui, Patrick DeBonis, Haim Grebnev, Zhiyuan Jiang, Yu-Hsiang (Fred) Lin, Nicholas Lohr, Shaver Phagan, Yueqi Wang, and Wuzhe Xu.
About the Mathematics Department at Purdue University
The Department of Mathematics is one of seven departments making up Purdue's College of Science. The Department has an international reputation as an outstanding center for mathematical research and education. Over 70 professors are actively involved in research in many areas of mathematics, including visiting scholars and through a vibrant graduate program. The Department offers Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees. The department is located in the Math Building at 150 N. University Street in West Lafayette, Indiana. Learn more at math.purdue.edu.
Writer: Alisha Willett, amwillet@purdue.edu
Sources: Ernest Aboagye, Ajay Chandra, Shimeng Huang, Zhilin Luo, Shubhodip Mondal, Thi Hanh Vo, Yash Lodha, Siamak Yassemi