Research

My Research Interests

I love physics, and earned a minor in physics as an undergraduate. Studying applied math has allowed me to stand on the border between math and physics -and I love it here because I have a passport between disciplines. It allows me to study multiple subjects and cross borders between not only math and physics, but also biology, chemistry, engineering, computer science – it’s fantastic!

My most recent research focuses on pedagogical practices in teaching mathematical modeling. Most of the work I am actively doing involves promoting mathematical modeling in the classroom and making the mathematical modeling process approachable to students.

My PhD advisor, Arnold Kim, and I work on problems studying light propagation in biological tissues governed by the Radiative Transport Equation. We model backscattered light from layered tissue composed of a slab on a semi-infinite half space. Our work utilizes the corrected diffusion approximation which applies a boundary layer solution to the standard diffusion approximation and has shown significant improvement in data close to the source. This means that I currently am able to combine my interests in math, physics, and biology for the purposes of our research.

I had the honor of receiving the 2025 Distinguished Applied Mathematics Graduate Alumni Award from UC Merced. They let me do a talk on whatever I wanted, which was a joy, because I chose to talk about my bizarre path in my career and advocate for students to introspect and make choices aligned with their personal strengths and goals. Slides from my talk, as requested.

Journal Publications

  1. Rohde Poole, S. B. (2024). “Designing Mini Modeling Projects.” PRIMUS, 34(9), 925–940.
  2. Rohde Poole, S. B. (2021). “Designing an Undergraduate Mathematical Modeling Course for Mathematics Majors and Minors.” PRIMUS, 21.
  3. Poole, Shelley B. (2020). “Exercises Encouraging Creativity for Mathematical Modeling.” Gary Froelich and Jessica Libertini (Ed.), Consortium: The Newsletter of the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications 119th ed., 1-4.
  4. S. B. Rohde and A. D. Kim, “Backscattering of continuous and pulsed beams” SIAM Multiscale Modeling and Simulation, 15(4), 1356-1375.
  5. S.B. Rohde, “Modeling diffuse reflectance measurements of light scattered by layered tissues,” PhD thesis, University of California, Merced (2014). 81 pages; 3627669.
  6. S. B. Rohde and A. D. Kim, “Modeling the diffuse reflectance due to a narrow beam incident on a turbid medium,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 29, 231-238 (2012).
  7. S. B. Rohde and A. D. Kim, “A convolution model of the diffuse reflectance for layered tissues,” Opt. Lett. 39, 154-157 (2014).

For other publications and presentations, please see my CV

For fun, here’s a comic by xkcd: