AMS Early Career Profile: Peter Huggins

Peter Huggins Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Davis Graduate Institution: University of California, Berkeley Research Focus: Computational biology and applied mathematics Industry Sector: Education

What he does:

• In 2008 Peter Huggins earned his PhD in mathematics at UC Berkeley. He is now a Lane Fellow Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research mentor is Ziv Bar-Joseph, who heads the CMU Systems Biology Group. While at Berkeley, he worked on computational biology and algebraic statistics. He often worked with computers, and he spent the summer of 2005 as an intern at Google.

Math on the job:

• At Google, Peter used statistics and combinatorics to explore methods for improving search results. At UC Berkeley, he studied connections between computational biology and algebraic geometry (a powerful branch of mathematics which, despite having much to offer science, has been largely overlooked). He's used high-dimensional polyhedral geometry to find reliable alignments of DNA sequences of fruit flies. At UC Berkeley Peter collaborated on a project that used commutative algebra to compute hyperdeterminant formulas in order to better understand the "tangle" of a system of quantum computer bits.

Peter's background:

• Peter received his Bachelor's degree in mathematics from UC Davis, with a minor in computer science. While at UC Davis, he was a mathematics research assistant supervised by Jesus De Loera in the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program. He entered the UC Berkeley mathematics Ph.D. program in 2004 and earned his degree in 2008 under the supervision of Lior Samuel Pachter and Bernd Sturmfels. His dissertation title was Polytops in Computational Biology.

Advice for students:

• "If you're an undergrad who wants to excel in academics, then take the initiative. Don't just pass your required classes. Look for undergrad research opportunities, talk to your professors, take graduate courses, and write a senior thesis."