People

I met Dr. W.T. Ang (no relation to me) at the University of Adelaide. Although we both did our undergraduate degrees at around the same period of time, we only got to know each other better when I returned to Adelaide to pursue my Ph.D. Dr. W.T. Ang introduced me to Boundary Element Methods and we began working together on a couple of problems after he joined the Nanyang Technological University. We have since co-authored two papers on the area.
Web: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/mwtang/

Dr. Awyong and I were classmates during our undergraduate days at the University of Adelaide. She eventually majored in Pure Mathematics. Some years later, we met again when we both returned to Adelaide to do our Ph.D. Although we were from different departments (she was Pure and I'm Applied), we shared the same graduate students room together with three or four other postgraduates. Dr. Awyong and I both joined NIE on the same day (2 Dec 1996) after we obtained our PhD. Dr. Awyong and I wrote a joint paper on using Maple in First Year undergraduate mathematics.

Professor Yang Wei-Chi is the founder of ATCM LLC, and the chief editor of eJMT. I first met Wei-Chi in Singapore in the late 90's when he visited NIE. I attended ATCM 2000 (Chiang Mei, Thailand) and met him again. Subsequently, I was invited to join the International Programs Committee (IPC) of ATCM and have been in the committee ever since. When Wei-Chi started the eJMT (around 2007), he asked me to be one of the executive editors for the journal, and I agreed.

Professor Mazumdar was my supervisor for both my Honours project (on non-Newtonian blood flow through arteries) and my PhD studies. Dr. Mazumdar taught me undergraduate courses such as Vectors and Tensors, Mathematical Biology and Solid Mechanics. In my Honours year, I decided to work on a project in mathematical biology for my dissertation, and approached Dr. Mazumdar. As it turned out, my Honours work was good enough to be published (although this was some years later) in the journal, Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine and even won the Kenneth Clark award for best paper for the journal in 1991. Dr. Mazumdar had always encouraged me to continue with my studies after my graduation in 1985. In 1992, while passing by Singapore, Dr. Mazumdar met me at the Singapore airport to hand me the application forms for postgraduate studies in Adelaide. I returned to Adelaide the following year to begin my PhD studies under his supervision. The rest, as they say, is history.

Liang Soon was one of my MSc research students. He was also my first Honours students. For his Honours project, Liang Soon studied a basic model for dengue epidemics. His treatment was very theoretical. For his Masters thesis, he worked on the modelling the dynamics of avascular tumour growth with the use of stochastically perturbed partial differential equations. We have co-authored one journal paper based on this work and one conference paper. In 2012, Liang Soon embarked on a PhD study under my supervision. His PhD topic was on the Professional Development of Teachers of Mathematical Modelling in Singapore. For this study, he designed a School-Based Professional Development (SBPD) programme in which a framework for instruction in mathematical modelling developed by me (first in 2011, then refined in 2015) was featured. Liang Soon used a modified Schoenfeld's Analytic Tool to assess the effectiveness of the SBPD programme.

Dr Imam Solekhudin comes from the University of Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogjakarta, Indonesia. He came to Singapore in 2009 to do his PhD under my supervision. His work involved the use of Dual Reciprocity Boundary Element Method (DRBEM) to examine various water filtration problems, including shallow water seepage, irrigation, and so on. Imam and I have successfully published some of our results in journals such as Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements (EABE), and the Electronic Journal of Boundary Elements (EJBE). One of our papers was on the use of Laplace Transform DRBEM for a time-dependent infiltraion problem. Initially, due to the non-linearity of the problem, we had some difficulties using the Laplace Transform approach. After employing a predictor-corrector scheme, the problem was solved successfully and results were published in a paper in the EABE journal. Imam has since graduated and returned to UGM to take up an academic position there.