Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics
Whiting School of Engineering

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email: pkerger ( a t ) jhu.edu



I am a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University in the department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, working under the supervision of Prof. Amitabh Basu. I am currently on the job market and am primarily interested in positions with a significant teaching component. I'm mostly interested in optimization and its applications, currently working on both classical and quantum algorithms and complexity. Difficult combinatorial problems, elegant algorithms with geometric interpretations, and how we can take advantage of quantum mechanics for efficient computation fascinate me.

I am currently working as a research intern at NASA QuAIL through USRA under the supervision of Dr. David E Bernal Neira and Dr. Eleanor Rieffel, with whom I am working on distributed quantum algorithms.

I love teaching, and have taught a few courses as the primary instructor at JHU. I am a teaching fellow of the department of Applied Math and Statistics there, and have won multipe awards for my work as a teaching assistant at JHU. An overview of my teaching experience can be found here.

Before joining JHU, I completed my bachelor's degree in mathematics at Fordham University, where I had the great pleasure of working with Kei Kobayashi on parameter estimation for heavy-tailed stochastic processes.

I'm also a bassist, guitarist, and beginning drummer, and used to play bass for the band Zombie Sundae.
"You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms."
-Grigory Perelman