Yunan Yang

Yunan Yang is the Goenka Family Assistant Professor in Mathematics at Cornell University, within the Department of Mathematics, College of Arts and Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (2018), supervised by Prof. Björn Engquist. Previously, he was a Courant Instructor at NYU (2018–2021), Simons-Berkeley Research Fellow (2021), and Advanced Fellow at ETH Zürich (2022–2023).

His research focuses on computational mathematics, including inverse problems, optimal transport, machine learning, and nonconvex optimization. Notable contributions include applications of optimal transport to seismic inversion and PDE-constrained optimization. He has advised numerous students, including undergraduates and Ph.D. candidates at Cornell and other institutions.

Yang teaches courses such as MATH 6220 (Applied Functional Analysis) and has published extensively in journals like SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. His work bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications in geophysics and computational science.