Dr. Ryad Ghanam Made Fellow at UK’s Prestigious Institute of Mathematics and its Applications

Dr. Ryad Ghanam, Professor of Mathematics from our Liberal Arts and Sciences department, has been named a Fellow at the prestigious The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the UK’s chartered professional body for mathematicians and one of the UK’s esteemed societies for mathematics.

The IMA aims to advance mathematics and its applications, promote and foster research and other inquiries directed to the advancement, teaching, and application of mathematics, to seek to establish and maintain high standards of professional conduct for members, and to seek to promote, encourage and guide the development of education and training in mathematics.

Fellowships are awarded to those with a senior professional standing based on demonstrable achievement and competence in developing or the application of mathematics. Membership is limited to 5,000 members, and less than 10% of members are from outside the UK.

“I am honored to be selected as a Fellow member of the IMA,” Dr. Ghanam said. “I am very excited at this opportunity and I look forward to working with my colleagues at the IMA. I believe the impact of this fellowship be will immense on my research. I am thankful for the continuous support that I receive from VCUarts Qatar and Qatar Foundation without which I would not be where I am today.”

Dr. Ghanam received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Toledo in the US, and his B.S in Mathematics from the University of Jordan. He joined VCUarts Qatar in 2014 after considerable teaching experience in the United States.

Dr. Ghanam has worked extensively in fields related to research and teaching, both in the US and in Qatar. He played an active role in the PA Multi-Region STEM Initiative between 2012-2014, where he was a consultant for a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) grant funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Dr. Ghanam’s role was to train Western Pennsylvania teachers on how to teach STEM subjects to school-aged students. He actively participated in workshops held by NASA, as part of the training.

In addition, Dr. Ghanam mentored several projects for secondary students in Qatar. These projects were part of Qatar STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) Fair. Dr. Ghanam is a familiar face at local schools in Qatar, such as American School of Doha, where he has delivered presentations about the integration of technology in the classroom. As an educator who believes not only in the importance of math research but also in the value of math education, he has been, and still is, invited to teach challenging math principles to students of all ages.

At VCUarts Qatar, Dr. Ghanam teaches several courses at various levels and is currently working with three undergraduate students, two from Qatar campus and one from Richmond campus. This work is in collaboration with other faculty members at VCUarts Qatar and VCU Richmond.

The students will present their work at the Environmental Design Research Association 2022 (EDRA 2022) conference to be held in the United States. The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) is a prestigious conference in the area of environmental design, whose members are at the cutting edge of combining scholarly research and creative practice that include but are not limited to art, design, architecture, environment and behavior studies, and evidence-based design.

Additionally, Dr. Ghanam is heavily involved with the graduate program at the VCU Richmond campus and is currently supervising and co-supervising several Ph.D. students.

Dr. Ghanam’s research interests include applied differential geometry and its applications, Lie algebras and Lie groups, as well as numerical analysis and numerical solutions to partial differential equations.

Recently, Dr. Ghanam has been working on applied problems in mathematics, his most recent work being the modeling and monitoring of COVID-19 in Qatar. For this, Dr Ghanam collaborated with Professors in the VCU Richmond campus and Qatar University to establish a mathematical model for the Covid-19 outbreak in Qatar.

This model uses the Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered and Death (SEIRD) status through time. It also uses interventions to quantify the impact of various government attempts to slow the spread of the virus. Predictions are made to determine when the peak of active infections will occur. Dr. Ghanam’s work was published in the journals of ‘Letters in Biomathematics’ and the ‘Journal of Applied Statistics’.

Dr. Ghanam is the recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Awards in Research and Teaching for the  2019-2020 academic year at VCUarts Qatar.