News updates from the Department of Mathematics for the year 2007.

• Mr. Scott Dixon joins the department as a full-time instructor after several years serving as a visiting faculty member. His primary responsibilities will be the development and teaching of the restructured pre-calculus course sequence. Before joining UAB, Scott was a mathematics instructor at Sardis High School (Etowah County), Oak Mountain High School (Shelby County), and Vestavia Hills High School. He received his M.S. from the University of Alabama in 1994.
• Dr. Roman Shterenberg received his Ph.D. from St. Petersburg State University (Russia) in 2003 under direction of the world renowned mathematical physicist Mikhail Birman. Prior to joining UAB, he held a postdoctoral position at St. Petersburg State University and was the Van Vleck Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin for the past two years. He plans to continue his research in the areas of differential operators and partial differential equations as related to fluid mechanics and periodic structures.
• Ms. Laura Stansell received an M.S. in education from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1996 and another M.S. in mathematics from UAB in 2003. After having taught at various high schools and colleges in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, Laura will be leading the instructional efforts in finite mathematics and at the basic and intermediate algebra levels.
• Dr. Lei Zhang, an expert in nonlinear partial differential equations and their applications, joined the UAB math faculty after spending the past three years as the John Thompson Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. Lei received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University under the direction of Yanyan Li in 2001 and then joined the math faculty at Texas A&M as Visiting Assistant Professor.
• Dr. James J. Buckley retired from the Department of Mathematics in August 2007. He had been a member of the faculty since the fall of 1976 and we wish him the best of luck for his future.