CLASS NOTES continued from page 30


2000 Erin Byrne is a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics. She was an engineering major at HMC and went on to earn an M.S. and


Ph.D. in applied math from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her thesis topic was “Post-Fragmentation Density for Bacterial Aggre- gates.” From 2000–2003 she worked for the Aerospace Corporation on vehicle concept design, including the Mars Exploration Rover and second- and third-generation GPS. Her research interests include mathematical biology, PDEs, modeling and fluid dynamics.


2002 REUNION YEAR Loren Perlman attended the


wedding of Jonathon Nadel ’03 and Annie des Barres on June 26, 2011 in Malibu, Calif. Mudders in attendance were Jonathon Nadel ’03, Justin Schauer ’03, Dmitriy Kogan ’03, Daniel Pennington, David Uminsky ’03, Nils Napp ’03, Galway O’Mahony ’03, Shea Lawrence ’03 and Dan Gianotti ’03.


2005 Jeff Hellrung researches numerical methods to solve Poisson problems in irregular domains and with irregular internal interfaces, with


applications to multiphase fluid simulations. Past research has included resolving triangulated surfaces against deformable tetrahedralized volumes (more of a computational geometry flavor), with applications to fracture simulation. He spoke about his career at a fall HMC Career Services event.


After graduating from HMC, Chris Wottawa worked for three years with two start-up companies, then returned to graduate school in 2007. He recently began his fifth year in the biomedical engineering program at UCLA, where he is working on developing a tactile feed- back system for robotic and other types of minimally invasive surgery.


2006 Under Alice Shapley, associate professor, UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, Kevin Hainline is studying galaxy evo-


Nadel-des Barres wedding guests


2003 Molly Waring and Ben FrantzDale were married in Woods Hole, Mass., in June 2009. Photos of the taller-than-the-bride tenseg-


Waring-FrantzDale Wedding


rity wedding cake engineered and baked by the groom are available at tinyurl.com/Waring- FrantzDaleCake. Ben earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering from RPI in 2007, worked for 3M as a senior research and development engineer (until they moved the project to Min- nesota), and is currently princi- pal engineer and project man-


ager for a tech startup, Lantos Technologies, in Cambridge, Mass. (they do 3-D ear scanning). In May 2009, Molly completed her Ph.D. in epidemiology and is currently an assistant professor in the Division of Epidemiology of Chronic Diseases and Vulnerable Populations in the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (yeah, it’s a mouthful). They spent two glorious years living in a yuppie loft in downtown Boston, which has very recently gotten too small (well, too devoid of walls) for their new family member, Alice, born April 2011. Molly and Ben are very much enjoying parenthood.


Alice FrantzDale


lution by looking at those galaxies that harbor supermassive black holes at their centers. His work seeks to understand why some gal- axies have central black holes that are actively pulling in mate- rial, and others do not, and how these black holes affect their hosts.


2007 REUNION YEAR Christopher “Topper” Kain married Jennifer Erin Hodges from Tulane


University on July 23. Jen and Topper were introduced at HMC by Jen’s sister, Kelley Hodges ’09 in 2005. Jen attended HMC for a semester while Tulane was shut down due to hurricane Katrina. The happy couple live near Washington, D.C., with their dog Tchaps.


2008 Max Gibiansky works in the Bioengineering Department at UCLA in the research group of Gerard Wong (wonglab.seas.ucla.edu). Max is


studying the development of bacterial biofilms, microbial communities that form on surfaces. Many bacteria in nature are found in biofilms and have a greatly increased resistance to many forms of stress, including antibiotics. He uses high-frame-rate brightfield microscopy and particle tracking algorithms to follow the motion of large numbers of cells on the surface. Using this technology, they have observed a previously unknown mechanism of bacterial motion and have been able to see the friction interactions between the bacteria, the surface and the ‘glues’ bacteria secrete.


Starcraft guru Sean Plott spoke at HMC about the military science fiction strategy video game as part of Art Benjamin’s Mathematics of Games course.


continued on page 34


32 Har vey Mudd College FALL/WINTER 2011


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