25/07/2023

Maria Soledad presents a lecture on optimal control.

FGV (Getúlio Vargas Foundation) researcher Maria Soledad led the outreach lecture “Optimal control: theory, applications and challenges” this Tuesday (25) . For a packed auditorium, the researcher presented the problems that gave rise to the theory of optimal control and discussed theoretical and practical aspects until reaching current applications and challenges.

“I was very pleased to be able to publicize this area of research, which is not very developed, from a mathematical point of view, in Brazil. It is something I have been building for ten years since I arrived here at IMPA in 2014 for an excellent post-doctoral program and later joined FGV as a professor,” said the researcher.

Soledad works with applications of mathematical epidemiology involving disease or pest control, and vaccination optimization, which has even included Covid-19, through the optimization of testing.

The researcher used the Colloquium to publicize the Marília Chaves Peixoto Chair program, which has opened applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or Data Science. The FGV initiative aims to increase the number of women at the higher levels of qualification in mathematics and computer science.

“I am a professor and coordinator of the postgraduate program at FGV EMAp, and I am the only woman on the permanent faculty. We are seeing that the percentage of women entering undergraduate programs is low, and this is decreasing. It's even lower at the master's level and sometimes zero at the doctoral level. So, how are we going to hire female professors if they aren't even reaching the doctoral level? Therefore, we created this postdoctoral fellowship program of up to three years. I would like to have many candidates to continue this program for many years.”

Applications for the program are open until August 31st. Marília Chaves Peixoto (1921-1961) was the first woman to complete a doctorate in mathematics. A researcher in the field of Dynamical Systems, her work on convex functions had international repercussions. In 1951, Marília joined the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, becoming the first Brazilian woman to be a member of that institution. She died in 1961, at the age of 39.