Yakov Berchenko-Kogan

Yakov Berchenko-Kogan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Systems Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), part of the College of Engineering and Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT (2016) and a B.S. in Mathematics from Caltech (2011), with a minor in Control and Dynamical Systems. His research focuses on developing high-order, structure-preserving numerical methods for problems in differential geometry and geometric analysis, particularly within the framework of finite element exterior calculus. He has held postdoctoral positions at institutions including Pennsylvania State University, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Washington University in St. Louis.

His expertise spans numerical analysis, differential geometry, and computational mathematics, with a strong emphasis on geometric numerical methods and their applications to geometric PDEs. He actively engages in academic outreach, encouraging undergraduate and graduate students to pursue capstone projects or research collaborations. His work has been published in high-impact journals such as Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Geometriae Dedicata, and Journal of Nonlinear Science.

Berchenko-Kogan’s research interests include finite element methods, geometric decomposition techniques, and the numerical approximation of geometric objects like the Levi-Civita connection and mean curvature flow self-shrinkers. He also explores structure-preserving algorithms for equations in mathematical physics, such as Maxwell’s and Yang-Mills equations.