Joseph Teran


Joseph M. Teran is an American professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Davis. His research considers numerical methods for partial differential equations based on classical physics, including applications in virtual surgery and movie special effects.
He played a role in simulating snow and ice in the film Frozen, collaborating with Disney's animators.
WWW math.ucdavis.edu/~jteran

Education and career

After graduating from the University of California, Davis, in 2000, Teran completed a Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2005. His dissertation, Novel Finite Element Algorithms With Applications To Skeletal Muscle Simulation, was supervised by Ronald Fedkiw.
He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 2005 to 2007, and a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2007 to 2020. In 2020 he returned to the University of California, Davis as a professor of mathematics.

Recognition

Teran's accolades include: