Bryan Quaife, PhD (’11)

Quaife put his applied mathematics expertise to use studying a range of topics from red blood cells to wildfire dynamics.

Bryan Quaife completed his PhD in applied mathematics at SFU, focusing his research on integral equations. “My experience at SFU set the course for a productive postdoc at the Institute for Computational Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin,” he says. “I worked there on what are called vesicle suspensions. These are moving interfaces inside of a viscous fluid. The main application is for studying the dynamics of red blood cells inside of a capillary. I used integral equation methods to do this,” he explains.

In addition to academics, Quaife says the SFU faculty offered support in professional development. “There were many faculty members who were hands-on and gave lots of great advice about everything from writing proposals to giving talks to delivering lectures. I was also really fortunate that they gave me several opportunities to train as an educator,” he says.

Quaife is currently an Assistant Professor at Florida State University in the Department of Scientific Computing. He still works on projects that he began in his PhD and postdoc., but he has recently branched into other areas, including wildfire dynamics.