People

Dr. Tegan Emerson

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Colorado State University

University of Texas, El Paso

Tegan Emerson received her PhD in Mathematics from Colorado State University. She was a Jerome and Isabella Karle Distinguished Scholar Fellow in optical sciences at the Naval Research Laboratory from 2017-2019. In 2014 she had the honor of being a member of the American delegation at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. Dr. Emerson is now a Senior Data Scientist and Team Leader in the Data Sciences and Analytics Group at Pacific Northwest Laboratory. In addition to her role at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Dr. Emerson also holds Joint Appointments as Affiliate Faculty in the Departments of Mathematics at Colorado State University and the University of Texas, El Paso. Her research interests include geometric and topological data analysis, dimensionality reduction, algorithms for image processing and materials science, deep learning, and optimization.



Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

University of Washington


Henry Kvinge received his PhD in Mathematics from UC Davis where his research focused on the intersection of representation theory, algebraic combinatorics, and category theory. After two years as a postdoc in the Department of Mathematics at Colorado State University where he worked on the compressive sensing-based algorithms underlying single-pixel cameras, he joined PNNL as a senior data scientist. These days his work focuses on leveraging ideas from geometry, and representation theory to build more robust and adaptive deep learning models and frameworks.


Dr. Timothy Doster

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory



Tim Doster is a Senior Data Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He received the B.S. degree in computational mathematics from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2008 and the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics and scientific computing from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2014. From 2014 to 2016, he was a Jerome and Isabella Karle Distinguished Scholar Fellow before becoming a Permanent Research Scientist in the Applied Optics division with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. During his time with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory he won the prestigious DoD Laboratory University Collaboration Initiative (LUCI) grant. His research interests include machine learning, harmonic analysis, manifold learning, remote sensing, few-shot learning, and adversarial machine learning.


Dr. Sarah Tymochko

Michigan State University



Dr. Sarah Tymochko received her PhD in mathematics in 2022 from the Michigan State University in the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering under the advisorship of Dr. Liz Munch. Her dissertation research focuses on topological tools for time series analysis. In 2017 she recieved a B.A. in mathematics from College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her research interests include topological data analysis, dynamical systems, time series analysis, network science, and machine learning.

Dr. Alex Cloninger

University of California, San Diego

Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute


Alex Cloninger is an Associate Professor in Mathematics and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland in 2014, and was then an NSF Postdoc and Gibbs Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Yale University until 2017, when he joined UCSD. Alex researches problems in the area of geometric data analysis and applied harmonic analysis. He focuses on approaches that model the data as being locally lower dimensional, including data concentrated near manifolds or subspaces. These types of problems arise in a number of scientific disciplines, including imaging, medicine, and artificial intelligence, and the techniques developed relate to a number of machine learning and statistical algorithms, including deep learning, network analysis, and measuring distances between probability distributions.