March Student Feature: Rafael Ceja Ayala

02-27-2023

Rafael Ceja Ayala is a fifth year Ph.D candidate working under the guidance of Dr. Isaac Harris. Rafael is an applied mathematician whose research interests are in direct and inverse problems for Partial Differential Equations. He is currently working on an inverse shape problem that comes from an acoustic isotropic scattering problem dealing with two conductivity parameters. In his previous project, they he not assume that 𝜆≠1 for one of the conductivity parameters. You can read more about the project where 𝜆=1 here (PDF).

Rafael will be presenting the work that he did for his first paper (Accepted in Applicable Analysis Journal), at SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE23) in Amsterdam at the end of February and at the 12th Ohio River Analysis Meeting in Cincinnati at the beginning of March. 

Rafael is a Gates Millennium scholar and has been part of the organization since fall 2014. At Purdue, he became part of the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program and has worked with the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program mentoring undergraduate students since Fall 2021. Additionally, he is co-organizing the Basic Skills seminar as well as the Graduate Student Analysis seminar here in the mathematics department. Aside from mathematics, he is a photographer and a poet/writer. You can find some of his photography work here and his writing here.