Passing the Torch
Dr. Piotr Mikusinski was recently honored by the College of Sciences for his hard work as the Department Chair of Mathematics. A small celebration featuring a cookie cake and fellow associates, including Dean Johnson, was held in the College of Sciences building. Dr. Mikusinski will return to being a faculty member and focus on his research with generalized functions and abstract harmonic analysis.
Dr. Mikusinski plans to get involved with a major mathematics education (STEM education) project. In particular, he would like to learn more about “active learning” and “peer evaluations” methods and develop a course that is based on these ideas. He will collaborate with UCF faculty (for example, from Physics and Biology) and visit faculty at other universities who have success with these innovative approaches.
It is Dr. Mikusinski’s intention to visit his collaborators in Poland and Sweden to work on research project in generalized functions and abstract harmonic analysis. He believes he should be able to finish the introductory linear algebra textbook he has been working on for quite some time with his collaborator in Sweden, Professor Dragu Atanasiu.
Dr. Mikusinski recived his Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematics, the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland in 1983. Once he graduated with his Ph.D., Mikusinski served as a visiting lecturer in the Deparment of Mathematics for the University of California, Santa Barbara, for two years. Dr. Mikusinski moved to the University of Central Florida’s Mathematics department in 1985 and has remained a loyal faculty member ever since. He has served as an Associate Professor, Professor, Senior Faculty Fellow in Graduate Studies, and served as the Mathematics department chair in his time at UCF. Dr. Mikuskinski’s primary areas of research are generalized functions, real analysis, abstract harmonic analysis, theory of integration and measure, doubly stochastic measures, convergence structures, and mathematics education.
In an email to colleagues, Dean Michael Johnson stated, “I would like to take this opportunity to thank him (Piotr) publicly for the wonderful job he has done for nearly ten years. He is thoughtful, determined, and constructive. He helped the department weather a very challenging time of budget cuts and enrollment growth. The Mathematics Department has an unusually broad mission, responsible as it is for the mathematics education of nearly every UCF undergraduate, in addition to majors, minors, graduate students, and research. Piotr worked hard and creatively to support and improve all of these. I am grateful for his wisdom and kindness and determination, and thank him for his dedication and generosity in serving the department as chair for so long.”
Dr. Xin Li, Department Chair of Mathematics
Dr. Xin Li will now serve as the new chair of the Department of Mathematics. Dr. Li is a Professor of Mathematics and his main research is in approximation theory in the complex plane, with additional collaborations in engineering and computer science. He played a significant role in an NSF-funded project to emphasize computational sciences for undergraduates, in addition to grants for research. He served for six years as graduate coordinator in Mathematics. Dr. Li received his B.S. and M.S. from Zhejiang University and his Ph.D. from USF.
As for taking on this new responsibility, “Thanks to the hard work and dedication of Dr. Mikusinski, I feel very lucky that I inherited a department that is in great shape and is ready to step up at a higher level in both academic productivity and work environment. I will work hard to bring out the best of every faculty member by promoting excellence in research and teaching, to keep our curriculum up to date, and to serve the community through carefully designed outreach activities.”, Dr. Li states.