Applied Mathematics

Nikki Sanderson received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a dissertation on computationally efficient methods of topological data analysis (TDA) for distinguishing nonlinear dynamical systems.  She then became a postdoctoral scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2019 through 2020, researching TDA methods with application to neuroscientific data and machine learning.  After teaching high school mathematics at The Archer School for Girls, she started working with postdoctoral mentor Carina Curto at Penn State in the summer of 2021 on understanding neuromodulation in the context of threshold-linear network models, as well as analyzing spontaneous neural activity observed in zebrafish larvae optic tectum, a collaboration with the Sumbre Lab at École Normale Supérieure.  She will continue this research with Dr. Curto in the Applied Math Department at Brown University.