Youngmin Park

Assistant Professor, The University of Florida · park.y@ufl.edu

Sunset on 39th Street
Sunset on 39th St.

Bio Research

  • Cell physiology: molecular motor transport, dendritic spines, intermediate filaments.
  • Electrophysiology: neural oscillators and synchrony, auditory cortex function.
  • Immunology: modeling sepsis response (in collaboration with Dr. Jing Pan in ECE).

Mathematical Methods

ODE/PDE/SDE modeling and relevant analysis methods (Floquet theory, coupled oscillator theory, perturbation theory). I am also moving in the direction of applying data-driven methods to biological problems (SINDy, DMD).

Personal Bio

Full moon in Gainesville I'm mostly from Madison, Wisconsin. I am originally from Seoul, South Korea, but lived in the US since the second grade. I went to middle school and high school in Madison, WI. I went to college in Cleveland and received my BS and MS in applied math at Case Western Reserve University. It is not a military school - it is named after the Western Reserve, which is territory that includes most of Northeastern Ohio. The "Case" part comes from the Case Institute of Technology (CIT) which merged with Western Reserve University in the 70s. At the time, both CIT and Western Reserve were top-tier research institutions with CIT second only to Cal Tech. I worked with Dr. Hillel Chiel (Biology) and Dr. Peter Thomas (Math, Applied Math, and Stats) for my masters thesis at Case Western. They are wonderful people and exceptionally knowledgeable across multiple domains.

For my PhD I went to the University of Pittsburgh. Here, I had the distinct pleasure of working with my advisor Bard Ermentrout. He is great. I also hold the rest of my thesis committee in high regard: Rob Coalson, Brent Doiron, and Jon Rubin.

Gainesville summer morning I have had 3 postdocs. The first at U Penn in auditory neuroscience with Maria Geffen, the second at Brandeis with Thomas Fai, and the third at U Manitoba with Stéphanie Portet. All my postdoc advisors are phenomenal humans and researchers.

I have found my permanent home in Gainesville, Florida. There are many lizards here!