Today at Brown

As a professor and researcher, Kavita Ramanan has chosen a unique area of focus that potentially allows her to work with peers in many other fields.

She is an applied mathematician, specializing in probability theory, the understanding of phenomena that can have multiple outcomes with different probabilities. Such a study area can help comprehend the reason behind errors transmitted in computers, or mutations in biological sequences.

The possibilities are numerous.

“Probability theory is one of the many versatile fields that can be applied to the manufacturing industry, telecommunications, and biological models,” Ramanan said. “There is a huge variety of industries interested.”

She added that at the same time, there are “many exciting fundamental developments taking place in probability theory.”

Ramanan, 38, will come to Brown in January as a professor of applied mathematics. Until then, she’ll be finishing work at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she had been associate professor since September 2003. She advanced to full professor last June.

“Brown is uniquely positioned in terms of having a wonderful area of people in probability,” Ramanan said. “There are not many applied mathematics departments in the country and Brown’s is one of the best.”

Ramanan said she is excited to be coming to teach at Brown, where she earned her Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1998. “It was one of the best periods of my life and I really learned a lot,” she said. “The applied mathematics people were very congenial and I am still in close touch with many I knew at graduate school. And it was a rich, intellectual atmosphere and culturally diverse.”

Ramanan, originally from Mumbai, India, earned her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. She said she was drawn to applied mathematics — and probability theory in particular — after she did her thesis on stochastic processes for reactions in engineering.

“I realized I liked to be able to have a rigorous understanding of how formulas are derived, and was not satisfied with a heuristic approach,” she said.

As a professor and researcher at Brown, Ramanan hopes she can create a “vibrant intellectual atmosphere” for her students, with active seminars and innovative courses.

She also wants to forge connections with different departments within Brown, working with professors in biology, computer science, and other fields. Her goal: “To come up with innovative models that would give rise to interesting fundamental problems in mathematics, with potential applications in diverse areas.”