Buliga promoted to full professor

Dr. Marius Buliga, director of its applied mathematics program, has been promoted to full professor.

His research areas cover graph theory, the use of technology in teaching undergraduate math classes, and programming and statistical modeling with medical applications.

In the area of graph theory, he has continued the work he performed for his doctoral thesis at the University of Pittsburgh, authoring or co-authoring three papers.

In the area of technology use in undergraduate teaching, he served as co-investigator alongside Dr. Richard Melka, retired professor of mathematics, for a $150,000 teaching grant from Hewlett-Packard and Zippo Manufacturing Co. The grant provided a mobile lab with 20 tablets used to teach math at Pitt-Bradford. Buliga has presented four papers on the research at conferences.

In the area of programming and statistical modeling, he worked with faculty from the University of Pittsburgh and Pitt School of Medicine on three National Institutes of Health grants. The first grant funded a study intended to find better and more inexpensive ways of detecting Parkinson's disease in its early stages.

The second grant funded a study to find the combination of substances that would provide the largest reduction in the number of parasites in mosquitoes infected with malaria.

Finally, a third grant funded a study to determine whether patients with trauma admitted to the hospital were at high or low risk of dying.

Before coming to Pitt, he co-authored a mathematics text in his native Romania, where he also taught programming languages.

At Pitt-Bradford, he teaches calculus, Discrete Mathematics, Linear Algebra, Numerical Analysis, Operations Research, Abstract Algebra and Number Theory.