Doug Hardin

Doug Hardin is a Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Biomedical Informatics (secondary) at Vanderbilt University, where he has been employed since 1986. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1985) and has built a distinguished career in applied and computational mathematics.

His educational background includes:

• Ph.D., Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1985
• M.E.E., Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, 1982
• B.E.E. (with highest honors), Electrical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1980

Hardin's research lies at the intersection of pure and applied mathematics, with strong applications in data science and biomedicine. His primary interests include discrete minimum energy problems, inverse problems, wavelets, and machine learning in bioinformatics. He has made foundational contributions to the theory of energy-minimizing point configurations on manifolds and the construction of wavelets using fractal interpolation functions. His work in machine learning, particularly on support vector machines, has been applied to cancer diagnosis and genomic marker selection.

The trends in his publications reveal a deep and consistent focus on mathematical methods for energy minimization, asymptotic analysis, and wavelet theory, with increasing applications to biomedical informatics and geoscience. His most recent work includes inverse problems in magnetization, relevant to geoscience, and feature selection in SVM models for biomedical data.

His notable scientific awards and honors include:

• Vanderbilt University Chancellor’s Research Award (2005)
• Associate Editor, Mathematics of Computation (2011–present)
• Former Tennessee State Director for the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA)

Hardin has advised numerous students and collaborators, many of whom are co-authors on his publications. He has served in visiting roles at the University of Dundee and Sandia National Laboratory, and he organized the 2016 Shanks Workshop on inverse magnetization problems, indicating active leadership in his field. He has not received any external grants explicitly mentioned in the text, but his sustained publication record and editorial role suggest significant research activity.

He is affiliated with the Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University, and his work bridges mathematical theory with applications in biomedical informatics and geoscience through interdisciplinary collaboration.