W. A. "Tex" Moncrief, Jr. Distinguished Professorship in Computational Engineering and Sciences - Data Science
Professor Mathematics
Prof. Ward is the W.A "Tex" Moncrief Distinguished Professor in Computational Engineering and Sciences — Data Science and Professor of Mathematics at UT Austin. From 2017-2018, she was a visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research. She is recognized for her contributions to sparse approximation, stochastic optimization, and numerical linear algebra. Prior to joining UT Austin in 2011, Dr. Ward received the PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics at Princeton in 2009 and was a Courant Instructor at the Courant Institute, NYU, from 2009-2011.
Dr. Ward's research lies broadly in the mathematics of data. Motivated by applications in signal and image processing, dynamical systems, and biology, her work often synthesizes tools from optimization, numerical linear algebra, dynamical systems, scientific computing, sparse approximation, random matrix theory, and machine learning.