Welcome!

My name is Mallory E. Gaspard, and I am a sixth-year Ph.D. Candidate at Cornell University in the Center for Applied Mathematics. My primary research interests are in optimal control, mathematical modeling, and differential games. I was an NDSEG Fellow (Fellowship tenure: 2020 - 2023), and I am advised by Alexander Vladimirsky. I am on the academic job market for positions beginning in Summer / Fall 2025.

About Me:

Education:

• Ph.D. Cornell University, Center for Applied Mathematics: August 2019-Present
  • Advised by: Alexander Vladimirsky
  • Minor Committee members: Lionel Levine (Mathematics) and David Bindel (Computer Science)
• M.S. Cornell University, Applied Mathematics: Conferred May 2023
• B.S. Magna Cum Laude, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Mathematics and Applied Physics: Conferred December 2018

Current Research Interests:

• Optimal Control, Differential Games, and Numerical Analysis
  • Working with Alexander Vladimirsky on projects involving randomly terminated optimal control, PDEs, differential games, and numerical analysis. I am primarily interested in projects that involve randomly terminated optimal control, path planning under uncertainty, and differential or mean-field games involving uncertainty.

Preprints:

• Mallory E. Gaspard and Alexander Vladimirsky
  • Monotone Causality in Opportunistically Stochastic Shortest Path Problems

Publications:

• Mallory E. Gaspard
  • Optimality of Motion Camouflage Under Escape Uncertainty
    • arXiv
    • IEEE Xplore
• Mallory E. Gaspard and Alexander Vladimirsky
  • Optimal Driving Under Traffic Signal Uncertainty
    • A website with additional examples and movies
    • Source code
    • An earlier preprint version
• Philip Charles, Mallory Gaspard, Santiago Alvarez, William H. Armstrong, K. V. Lakshmi, and Peter J. Bonitatibus Jr.
  • Synthesis, Crystal Structure, EPR, and DFT Studies of an Unusually Distorted Vanadium(II) Complex
• Mallory Gaspard, Peter Craig, and Erik Bergland
  • An Integro-Differential Model of Language Competition

Filed Patent Applications:

• Alexander Vladimirsky and Mallory E. Gaspard, "10471-02-US: LANE-CHANGE TIMING DETERMINATIONS IN AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ROUTING".

Presentations & Posters:

• Note: Poster presentations are indicated by "*". All presentations were given in-person unless otherwise indicated.
• 10th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM, Tokyo, Japan) - August 2023
  • "Opportunistically Stochastic Shortest Path Problems: From PDEs to AV-Routing"*
• 2023 SIAM Conference on Control and its Applications (Philadelphia, PA) - July 2023
  • "Strategic/Tactical AV Routing Under Lane-Change Uncertainty"
• Cornell Scientific Computing and Numerics (SCAN) Seminar (Ithaca, NY) - March 2023
  • "Monotone Causality in Opportunistically Stochastic Shortest Path Problems"
• 2022 DoD National NDSEG Fellows Conference (Boston, MA) - July 2022
  • "Optimal Driving Under Traffic Signal Uncertainty"*
    • "Exemplary" / top winner in the Mathematics discipline.
• 18th IFAC Workshop on Control Applications of Optimization (Gif-sur-Yvette, France) - July 2022
  • "Optimal Driving Under Traffic Signal Uncertainty"
• NIST Applied and Computational Mathematics Division Seminar (Invited, Virtual) - June 2022
  • "Optimal Driving Under Traffic Signal Uncertainty"
• Cornell Scientific Computing and Numerics (SCAN) Seminar (Ithaca, NY) - April 2022
  • "Optimal Driving Under Traffic Signal Uncertainty"
• American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting (New Orleans, LA) - March 2017
  • "Electric Current Flow Through Two-Dimensional Networks"*

Teaching Experience:

• Cornell MATH 1106 Modeling with Calculus for the Life Sciences - Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spring 2025 (Upcoming)
• Cornell MATH 4220 / MATH 5220 Applied Complex Analysis - Graduate Teaching Assistant, Fall 2023, Fall 2024 (Current)
• RPI MATH 4600 Advanced Calculus - Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spring 2019
• RPI CSCI 4960 Rensselaer Center for Open Source - Mentor, Fall 2018
• RPI PHYS 2220 Quantum Physics II - Undergraduate Facillitator, Spring 2018

Industry Experience:

• The Aerospace Corporation (El Segundo, CA) - MTS Graduate Intern V, Modeling and Simulation Computing Division, May 2024 - Present
  • Responsible for large scale, multi-objective evolutionary algorithm development and implementation and Pareto front recovery.

Other Projects:

• Project founder and mentor for the Automatic Door Control Project, an open source hardware and software project to design a mobile application for users with disabilities to remotely open nearby automatic doors. We were fortunate enough to be recognized by Red Hat as a finalist for the Open Source Woman of the Year Award in 2019.

Service and Outreach Activities (Highlights):

• SIAM Cornell Student Chapter President - August 2022 - August 2024
• Graduate Student Mentor in the Graduate Students Mentoring Undergraduates program, August 2020 - August 2022
• Judge for the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board Spring Symposium (Invited), May 2021
• Participating Scientist in the Skype a Scientist program, 2019-2020
• Volunteer Instructor in the Cornell Math Explorer's Club, Fall 2020
• RPI Association for Women in Mathematics President, Fall 2018-Spring 2019
• Founding Member, RPI Women in Physics, Fall 2017

Personal:

• I was born and raised in Lafayette, LA in the heart of Cajun Country. I am of French-Cajun descent and heritage. I am (nearly) fluent in French, and I have spent three years in the Russian Language Program at Cornell. In 2023, I co-founded Litera: Ukrainian Educational Outreach at Cornell to provide free virtual speaking clubs for English language learners in Ukraine, and I currently serve as the organization's president. Here is a small list of additional organizations doing important work in Ukraine which I am passionate about:

  • Fight for Right
    • Provides direct assistance to Ukrainians with disabilities.
  • World Central Kitchen
    • Provides meals to millions in need in communities throughout the globe.
  • Shelter Ugolyok
    • Provides shelter and rehabilitation for hundreds of animals in need across Ukraine.

• A few of my hobbies & interests include listening to a wide variety of music (my top-streamed artists include Washed Out, Vampire Weekend, Beach House, and Claude Debussy), traveling, watching films, surfing, cooking, film photography, painting, tending to houseplants. Additionally, I love spending time with my friends and enjoying all that Ithaca has to offer!