Rate My Professor Boris Baeumer

Professor Boris Baeumer has been a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago since 2001, where he currently serves as the Postgraduate Adviser for Mathematics. He earned a Vordiplom from the University of Tübingen, an MSc, and a PhD in pure mathematics from Louisiana State University in 1997. Baeumer transitioned into applied mathematics during a postdoctoral fellowship in hydrology at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2000. Throughout his career, he has held significant leadership roles, including Chair of the New Zealand Branch of ANZIAM from 2013 to 2016 and membership on the Marsden Fund Mathematical and Information Sciences panel from 2015 to 2017. He also contributes to the academic community as a member of the editorial boards for Fractional Calculus & Applied Analysis, ANZIAM Journal, and Fractional Differential Calculus.

Baeumer's expertise lies in applied mathematics, with a focus on modeling fractal flow and anomalous dispersion in natural systems. His research addresses the movement of particles or organisms that deviate from classical diffusion theories, including solute transport of potentially toxic particles in groundwater and dispersal of organisms such as viruses or invasive species. He employs innovative approaches incorporating heavy-tailed distributions and fractal pathways, with applications in hydrology, ecology, epidemiology, chemical engineering, physics, economics, meteorology, and more. His projects have received prestigious funding, such as the Marsden Fund from the Royal Society of New Zealand for work on evolution equations with memory and random fluctuations, and Marsden Fast-Start funding in 2004-2005 for transport in fractal media. In 2005, he was awarded the Early Career Award for Distinction in Research by the University of Otago. Baeumer has delivered invited addresses at international conferences and authored over 45 scientific articles across mathematics, physics, geophysics, hydrology, and computer science. Key publications include 'A multivariate fractional Hawkes process for multiple earthquake mainshock aftershock sequences' (2025, with Davis and Wang), 'Boundary conditions for nonlocal one-sided pseudo-differential operators and the associated stochastic processes' (2024, with Kovács and Toniazzi), 'A fractional Hawkes process model for earthquake aftershock sequences' (2024, with Davis and Wang), and 'A higher order resolvent-positive finite difference approximation for fractional derivatives on bounded domains' (2022, with Kovács and Parry).