Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
Tony Wong received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado Boulder, where his dissertation research quantified the value of different sources of hydrological data for improving models for how water moves throughout an ecosystem. After completing his doctorate, Tony was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Earth & Environmental Systems Institute at Pennsylvania State University, after which he served as an Instructor at CU Boulder from 2017-19. He is now an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where his research program involves using mathematical and statistical tools to characterize uncertainty in physical models, and how these uncertainties affect decision-making in settings such as mitigating dangerous climate risks like sea-level rise. Tony's current research also examines disciplinary perspectives on Computational Literacy in science majors and uses data science tools to disentangle factors related to college student success and graduation rates. He said, "My time at OWU was really formative in terms of how I approach problems and dissect them. Dual-majoring in math and astrophysics gave me a great perspective on the tools to describe real-world phenomena (math) and how those phenomena actually work and affect other parts of a real-world system (physics). One of the most formative experiences that I had at OWU was an Astrophysics assignment where we used a spreadsheet model to represent the temperatures within a stellar atmosphere. I remember being amazed at how much power - pun intended – there was in even just using this simple program to model a seemingly impenetrable system. But in physics, we learn to break the system down into its component parts, and tackle these problems piece by piece. I loved that feeling, that no problem was too big to solve, as long as you were ready to break it down and work at it."