Katrina Morgan joined the Department of Mathematics as assistant professor in fall 2023. Before coming to Temple, Morgan was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. She has also held a postdoctoral appointment at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (now Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute). She earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Morgan’s main research interest is partial differential equations. "I am interested in understanding how geometry affects the behavior of waves like light and sound," explained Morgan. "Many of the questions I study are motivated by general relativity, which tells us the geometry of the universe is affected by massive objects. This in turn affects how light moves through the universe. I use techniques involving Fourier Theory to study the differential equations modeling light waves."
In 2016, Morgan co-founded Girls Talk Math, a free summer day camp for high-school students hosted annually at UNC-Chapel Hill. Students work in groups on a challenging STEM problem set and research the life and work of a scientist from a marginalized group. Student teams then produce a blog post about the math they learned and write and record a podcast about the scientist they researched. The camp expanded to the University of Maryland in 2018, Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2022 and then to Wake Forest University in 2024.