Welcome Courant's Newest Faculty Members (AY 2026-27)

August 31, 2026

The Department of Mathematics is thrilled to welcome seven new faculty members this year. Read through their short bios below to learn more about their bakgrounds and research interests: 

William Cooperman, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, joins Courant from ETH Zürich, where he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and Hermann-Weyl-Instructor. His research uses tools from probability, dynamical systems, and PDEs, to study long-time and large-scale behavior of random or periodic objects. Cooperman received his PhD from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Charles Smart.

Jiaoyang Huang, Associate Professor of Mathematics, researches probability theory and its applications to problems in statistics, combinatorics, statistical physics and computer science. He received his PhD from Harvard University, where he studied under the supervision of Horng-Tzer Yau. Huang conducted postdoctoral research at Courant and served as a Simons Junior Fellow before joining the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science with a secondary appointment in the Department of Mathematics.

Nikola Kovachki, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, works at the intersection of machine learning and physical modeling, with a particular interest in approximation theory, imaging, inverse problems, and uncertainty quantification. He obtained a PhD in applied and computational mathematics from Caltech under the supervision of Andrew Stuart. Professor Kovachki joins Courant from NVIDIA Research (NVR), where he worked as a research scientist focused on machine learning methods for the physical sciences. 

Zongyi Li, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Data Science, develops machine learning methods for scientific computing and discovery, specifically pioneering neural operators for learning solution operators in partial differential equations that arise in fluid mechanics and earth sciences. Li received his B.S. from Washington University in St. Louis, his Ph.D. from Caltech, and he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. 

Andrew Stuart, Professor of Mathematics and Chemical and Biological Engineering, researches applied and computational mathematics, and he is particularly interested in the question of how to optimally combine complex mechanistic models with data. He obtained his PhD from the Oxford University Computing Laboratory before joining the faculties of Stanford University, Bath University, and the University of Warwick. Stuart comes to Courant from Caltech, where he served as Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.

Hanwen Zhang, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, joins Courant from Yale University, where he was a Gibbs Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics. Zhang completed his PhD in Applied Physics at Yale. His research focuses on fast algorithms for computational problems in physics, using techniques from modern applied mathematics, including numerical methods for integral equations and analysis-based fast algorithms.

Alistair Adcroft, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Earth System Science and Engineering, will join NYU Tandon this fall with an additional affiliation at Courant’s Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science. His research is focused on numerical models of ocean circulation and climate, and on improving simulations of the Earth system with machine learning. Adcroft received his PhD in Physics from Imperial College before working as a researcher at UCLA and MIT. Until recently, he was Senior Research Oceanographer in the Program for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University, where he was an affiliate of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.