I am currently (Fall 2011--) a visiting assistant professor at UC Irvine.

I completed my Ph. D in mathematics at UCLA in the spring of 2011, under Tom Liggett. You can find my thesis here:

"Generating function zeros of Markov processes and their applications."

Teaching

Spring 2014: Math 140B.

email: vandenbe[AT]math.uci.edu

Office: Rowland Hall 510P.

Office hours: Wednesday, Friday 2 -- 3:30.

Research

My research interests are in interacting particle systems (especially exclusion and biased voter models), and more recently Boltzmann machines + neural networks.

Papers

The Williams Bjerknes model on regular trees (with O. Louidor and R. Tessler), to appear in Annals of Applied Probability (2014).

Trapping in the random conductance model (with M. Biskup, O. Louidor, and A. Rozanov), J. Stat. Phys. 150 (2013) 66--87.

Stability on {0,1,2,...}^S: birth-death chains and particle systems (with T. Liggett), Notions of positivity and the geometry of polynomials, Trends in Mathematics (2011), 311--330.

A limit theorem for particle current in the symmetric exclusion process, Elect. Comm. in Probab. 15 (2010), 240--252.

Expected shortest paths for landmark- based robot navigation (with A. Briggs, C. Detweiler, D. Scharstein), Inter. J. of Robotics Research. 23 (2004), 717–728.