Phillip Persley

Email: phillippersley [AT] berkeley
Phone & Address: Upon Request
AIM: phillippersley

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About Me

I am currerntly in my fifth year at UC Berkeley. I am majoring in Applied Math with an emphasis in Computational Science/Numerical Analysis. In the past year, I have also developed an interest in Actuarial Science and Operations Research. In my first three years at Cal, I was in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) department.

As of January 2009, I am no longer an Undergraduate Assistant for the Professional Development Program (PDP). I worked for PDP from Fall 2006 until Fall 2008 - five total semesters. As much as I enjoyed my job and working with students, I needed to dedicate more time towards school and research.

The picture above is my wordle. Although I attend Cal I am an ardent UCLA fan. In addition to everything mentioned, I am also a student parent. I have a 21 month old daughter named Sirena. Here is a picture of her (≈ 3 mb).

Diversity

I am very interested in STEM diversity, particularly minority representation in the Computing Sciences. While in the EECS department I was one of about five African-American undergraduates. As a student in the Math department that ratio is about the same or worse.

Personal Interests

During the last academic year I served as Vice President of UC Berkeley's undergraduate NSBE Chapter. In my spare time I enjoy playing basketball and Electric Bass -- Afro-Cuban music and Jazz in particular. Late in 2007 and early in 2008, I was a part of the Hijos de La Music Latina program. If I had more time, I'd like to start a Salsa band.

Previous Work

In my time at PDP I worked with both Math 32 (PreCalculus) and 1A (Calculus); my duties included working as a section assistant, conducting office hours/exam reviews. Over the years, I also worked as a private tutor for a variety of subjects, including trigonometry and integral calculus. Here is an example of some of my work.

Additionally, I worked as an undergraduate researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from Summer 2008 to early Spring 2009. My mentors were Dr. Juan Meza and Dr. Ali Pinar, now of Sandia National Lab. I spent most of my time testing and running experiments for Electronic Structure Calculations.

Announcements

10/07/09

• I'm still figuring out exactly how I'll organize my site. This is a link to my research poster for this past summer. The research was sponsored by the UC LEADS Program; for more information, check their site. We are in a relatively early stage but we hope to have a paper written by next summer. Right now we are planning and theorizing; next semester I hope to implement and test (and optimize) our algorithm. A useful and related paper that I'll be citing is "Efficient Algorithms for Computing A Strong Rank-Revealing QR Factorization" by Gu and Eisenstat. Many of my tests will mirror those mentioned in the paper.

10/01/09

• Still working on a page dedicated to my research. My mentor is Ming Gu, whose specialization is Numerical Linear Algebra. We are working on an implementation of an algorithm to solve Strong Rank-Revealing LU Factorizations, based off the paper "Strong Rank-Revealing LU Factorizations" written by Miranian and Gu.