Today at Brown

Johnny Guzman’s parents never attained more than a grade-school education. Immigrants from Mexico, they settled in California and worked on a factory assembly line. Still, they encouraged Guzman, the second youngest of eight children, to get an education.

It would be fair to say that their son has made them proud.

Guzman, 31, will be an assistant professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics beginning this fall. He will teach undergraduates differential equations for the first semester and numerical analysis in the spring.

“I always knew I liked math,” Guzman says. “I performed well [in math] on standardized tests. But I never considered, or thought, I’d be a college professor.”

In fact, Guzman figured he was destined to be a high school math teacher — if he made it that far. He freely admits that he slacked off through high school and only began to get serious when he attended Cerritos College, a community college in Torrance, Calif., outside Los Angeles, near where he grew up.

“For whatever reasons,” Guzman says, “something clicked, and I started doing well.”

His confidence rising, Guzman transferred to California State University–Long Beach and earned a bachelor’s degree in math in 1999. He was the first in his family to get a college degree.

He later earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell University. While there, he met Everilis, a Puerto Rican and fellow graduate student. The two married in 2005.

At Brown, Guzman will concentrate on numerical methods to solve partial differential equations. Specifically, he will delve into a branch of numerical analysis (itself a branch of applied math) known as “error analysis.”

You can think of error analysis as a guarantee of sorts, Guzman says. “If you run it on a computer, you can expect this, I can give you some guarantee,” he says. He hopes to apply his research to solid mechanics and fluid flow.

Despite his scholarly achievements, Guzman has not forgotten his roots. He points out his participation in the Society for Advancement of Chicano and Native Americans in Science, and says he would like to do something similar here.

“If it wasn’t for these sort of programs, I wouldn’t be here,” Guzman says. “Some people need an extra push.”