New Faculty Hires 2024-2025

Amin Hassan Zadeh

Amin Hassan Zadeh is presently a Professor of Practice at Oregon State University and an Adjunct Professor at Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences of Western University, Canada. He was previously a visiting associate professor at the Smeal’s Business School, Pennsylvania State University. From 2011 to 2019, he served as a faculty member at the National University of Iran's (now Shahid Beheshti University) Department of Actuarial Science. Amin has supervised more than 20 master's thesis and 4 Ph.D. actuarial science students. He has a strong background in the insurance industry in addition to his research and teaching. He is a Certified Appointed Actuary in Iran as well as an ASA and ACIA. Amin is interested in researching climate change, decentralized insurance, modelling and forecasting mortality rates, and quantitative finance in insurance.

Research Areas are in Climate Change, Decentralized Insurance, Quantitative finance in insurance and Modelling and forecasting mortality rates.

Serge Phanzu

Serge Phanzu is a new Instructor from the Democratic Republic of Congo. After completing his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from his home country, he received a scholarship and traveled to Italy for training in advanced courses in mathematics. Then he returned to Congo, and after a brief stay in Benin, he emigrated to the USA for Doctoral studies in mathematics.

His educational background is University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN), ICTP (International Center for Theoretical Physics), IMSP (Institut de Mathematiques et de Sciences Physiques), University of Alabama at Birmingham, Kent State University, Bowling Green State University. He held positions as an Assistant Professor at Kentucky State University and a Senior Instructor at Portland State University. His research interests lie in Operator theory. A notable publications is Every Pure Quasinormal Operator Has a Supercyclic Adjoint. HJM, Vol. 47, No. 2, 2021 Hobbies outside of work include Reading, watching a movie or news, and spending time with my family. He has been enjoying working with the department. He says the students are enthusiastic, and eager about their learning of mathematics.

Jane Shaw MacDonald

Jane Shaw MacDonald is a post-doctoral researcher at Oregon State University with the Mathematics Department. Before coming to OSU she earned her PhD in Mathematics at the University of Ottawa and was a Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Post-doctoral Fellow working at Simon Fraser University. Combining computational mathematics and mathematical modelling she studies ecological phenomena, like population dynamics in climate-driven moving habitats, optimisation of pesticide treatment in space and time, and fluid-structure interaction like those related to kelp, which is a facilitator of eco-system services. She has a keen interest in outdoor play, like cross-country skiing, and has developed a numerical method in 3D to study how a cross-country skier moves along a track.

Sergio Zamora

Sergio Zamora earned his PhD in Mathematics at Penn State University in 2022. Prior to joining OSU, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics at Bonn. His research focuses on the interaction between curvature and symmetry in metric spaces, and the stability of topological features under Gromov-Hausdorff convergence. Outside mathematics, his interests include football, 3D-animation, drawing, video games, and nature.