by Raven Lebeau

Created on: January 09, 2009

Albanian mathematician Fioralba Cakoni is currently an associate professor at the University of Delaware. Her research involves direct and inverse problems in acoustic, electromagnetic, and elastic scattering and wave propagation. She also studies boundary value problems. Dr. Cakoni's work has wide-ranging applications, including radar and sonar applications, bio-medical imaging techniques, non-destructive testing, structural design, and composite materials. Scattering problems are also important in the field of computer graphics.

Dr. Cakoni and her colleagues study the relationship between waves, such as sound or light, and the objects with which those waves interact. Applied scientists and engineers can build on the mathematical techniques developed, which will allow them to predict how a material will respond to waves, obtain information about an object based on its interaction with sound or light, and realistically model how a computer simulated object should behave under different sound and light conditions.

Much of Dr. Cakoni's research focuses on what are known as "inverse problems". An inverse problem involves taking collected data, such as a sonar signal, for example, and using that data to recover information about the physical system that generated that data. She is the co-author of Qualitative Methods in Inverse Scattering Theory : An Introduction.

Direct scattering problems are also a part of Dr. Cakoni's work. These problems focus on determining how an object will interact with waves based on the shape and composition of the object. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled "Some Results on the Abstract Wave Equation: Direct scattering problems in elasticity and thermoelasticity at low-frequency."

Fioralba Cakoni earned her doctoral degree in 1996 from Tirana University in Albania. She also earned her M.S. and undergraduate degrees at Tirana University. In September of 1998, she was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She became a GIG-NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Deleware in September of 2000. Two years later, she became as assistant professor there.

Dr. Cakoni's research career has been prolific. She is an author on over thirty four published articles and has been involved with ten different research grants. She also participates in a wide variety of conferences.

In addition to her research, Dr. Cakoni teaches graduate and undergraduate courses. Her teaching interests include basic and advanced courses in applied mathematics, partial differential equations, and inverse problems.

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