Magdalena Toda
Magdalena Daniela Toda is a Romanian-American mathematician and a professor of mathematics. Her research focuses on the curvature of surfaces, geometric flow, the geometry of timelike surfaces, and the uses of differential geometry and partial differential equations in scientific and engineering applications.
Education and career
Toda did her early education in Romania. She arrived in the US in 1995 as a student and is currently a US citizen. She earned a licenciate in mathematics from the University of Bucharest in 1991. After moving to the US, she continued her education at the University of Kansas, where she earned a second master's degree in 1997 and completed her Ph.D. in 2000, while also receiving a Ph.D. from the Politehnica University of Bucharest. Her dissertation, Pseudospherical Surfaces via Moving Frames and Loop Groups, was jointly supervised by Josef Dorfmeister at the University of Kansas, and Constantin Udriște of the Politehnica University of Bucharest.She became an assistant professor at Ball State University in 2000, and moved to her present position at Texas Tech in 2001. There, she was tenured as an associate professor in 2008 and promoted to full professor in 2014. She became interim department chair in 2015 and permanent chair in 2016, with a leave in 2022–2023 to serve as program director for applied mathematics at the National Science Foundation.