Rate My Professor Irina Perepelitsa

Irina Perepelitsa serves as Lecturer and Director for Instructional Support and Coordination in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Houston, where she has been employed since at least 2010, marking over 14 years of service by 2024. In her instructional role, she teaches foundational and intermediate undergraduate mathematics courses, including Calculus I (MATH 1431), Precalculus (MATH 2312), Discrete Mathematics (MATH 3336), College Algebra (MATH 1310), and Business Calculus (MATH 1314). As Director, she manages academic support initiatives such as tutoring programs, coordinates hiring for tutoring staff, handles general inquiries, and oversees resources like the CASA tutoring center. Her administrative contributions extend to involvement in programs including the SEP Workshop and TC Energy Summer Scholars Academy. She maintains an office in room 218A of the Philip Guthrie Hoffman Hall (PGH) and provides office hours to support student learning.

Perepelitsa holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics from Novosibirsk State University in Russia and earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Houston in Fall 2025, advised by Annalisa Quaini. Her research specialization is Discrete Mathematics, with publications spanning coding theory, graph coloring, and more recently crowd dynamics modeling. Key works include 'Explicit construction of families of LDPC codes with no 4-cycles' (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2004, co-authored with J.L. Kim, U.N. Peled, V. Pless, S. Friedland), 'Explicit construction of families of LDPC codes with girth at least six' (Proceedings of the Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, 2002, co-authored with J.L. Kim, U.N. Peled, V. Pless), 'Bounds on the chromatic number of intersection graphs of sets in the plane' (Discrete Mathematics, 2003), 'Colouring triangle-free intersection graphs of boxes on the plane' (Discrete Mathematics, 2000, co-authored with A.V. Kostochka), and 'Coupling microscopic and mesoscopic models for crowd dynamics with emotional contagion' (Frontiers in Physics, 2025, co-authored with A. Quaini). In recognition of her teaching excellence, she received the Provost Core Award in 2025. Her scholarly contributions demonstrate impact in discrete mathematics and related fields through peer-reviewed publications.