Mariana Smit Vega Garcia, PhD
Associate Dean (Fall & Spring), Professor of Mathematics
About
Mariana Smit Vega Garcia began working at WWU in 2018, starting as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and moving up to associate professor in 2021 and professor in 2024. She has chaired the department's Curriculum Committee since 2022 and has served on the university's Academic Honesty Board and the College of Science and Engineering's Strategic Planning Task Force. In 2023, she received WWU's Peter J. Elich Excellence in Teaching Award.
Dr. Smit Vega Garcia holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Purdue University, and bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the Universidade de São Paulo, in her hometown of São Paulo, Brazil. Prior to WWU, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington and, before that, in Germany at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Dr. Smit Vega Garcia's research is in analysis and partial differential equations, with a focus on free boundary problems, which describe phenomena such as the interface between ice and water as ice melts. Her work has been supported by two National Science Foundation research grants and a Karen EDGE Fellowship, and she serves on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society and Analysis and Mathematical Physics. Her courses span the range from calculus and linear algebra to graduate real analysis, and she has advised many masters' and senior projects at WWU.