Research Expertise and Interest

applied mathematics, partial differential equations, computational methods, biomedical research

Research Description

Suncica Canic (Sunny) earned her Ph.D. in 1992 in the area of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at SUNY Stony Brook. Upon her move to the University of Houston in 1999, she began collaborating with several medical specialists at the Texas Medical Center in Houston on problems related to cardiovascular treatment and diagnosis. She was honored for her research by the National Science Foundation as Distinguished MPS Lecturer in 2007, she received the US Congressional Recognition for Top Women in Technology in 2006, and the most prestigious award at the University of Houston, the Esther Farfel Award in 2018. Her research received local and national media attention, and was featured in several publications by NSF, NIH, and AMS. Canic was also invited to present a Congressional Briefing on Applied Mathematics, on Capitol Hill on December 6th, 2011. She serves on the Board of Governors of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in Minneapolis, and was the Program Director of the SIAM Activity Group on Partial Differential Equations. In 2014 she was elected Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She is the only woman to hold a prestigious Cullen Distinguished Professorship position at the University of Houston. Canic moved to UC Berkeley’s Mathematics Department in the Fall of 2018, and is currently serving as Full Professor there. Her research influenced the design of a stent for a bioartificial aortic valve placement, produced by a private consortium in Houston.