Dr. Joseph Turnbull

School Associate Director Math/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Phone: 4474
Email: jturnbu7@uwo.ca

Concurrent with a teaching gig at Western's Department of Applied Mathematics, I began teaching at King's as a sessional instructor and was eventually hired at King's full time. I've served continuously in administrative roles since being hired full time and am currently the Associate Director (Math and ADS) of the School of Management, Economics, and Mathematics at King's. 

My core mission is to help arm my students with quantitative reasoning and problem-solving skills - especially students who are fearful of math (that fearful student was me once upon a time). Together with Dr. Felipe Rodrigues and Dr. David Meredith, I founded a new (and now popular) discipline area called Analytics and Decision Sciences (ADS), which is highly aligned to careers in areas like finance and business analysis and is connected to a professional accreditation. In ADS, students utilize tools from mathematics, statistics, and computing – with grounding in psychology and philosophy – to extract insights that invite better decision-making in areas including business/management. While maintaining this professional character, one of my aims is to embed courses in history, philosophy, and literature into future ADS modules. 

In my free time, I'm most likely either with my spouse and kids, weightlifting, gardening, or finding some other excuse to be outdoors.

Education

Post-Doc - Computational Science, Center for High Performance Simulation (NCSU)

PhD - Physics, University of Alberta

BEd - Mathematics Education and Physics Education, University of Western Ontario

BSc - Applied Mathematics, University of Western Ontario

Teaching

My teaching areas are mathematics, calculus, and analytics (ADS). I usually teach 5 unique courses per year and provide coordination of at least one multi-section course per term. The courses I have taught at King's include:

• Calculus 1000 - Calculus I
• Calculus 1301 - Calculus II
• Math 0109 - Preparatory Mathematics*
• Math 0110 - Introduction to Calculus
• Math 1229 - Matrix Algebra
• Math 1230 - Calculus for Management*
• ADS 4294 - Complex Problem Solving*

* indicates courses I've developed

Research

My formal training is in applied mathematics, computational science, and theoretical physics. My PhD research focused on using mathematical models and computational/statistical methods to make predictions about the existence of novel phases of condensed many-body systems under extreme conditions (e.g., https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.78.144509). I subsequently worked as a postdoctoral research scientist on problems in nanoscience, using a combination of modeling and computation to try to predict materials properties with an eye to applications such as polymer-silicon semiconductor heterojunctions, impurity effects in carbon nanoribbons (example: J. Chem. Phys. 136, 014702 (2012); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3673441), etc. 

Along the way of doing this science research, I gained broad expertise in programming, modeling and simulation, and today am orienting myself more toward the application of this expertise to problems outside of the physical sciences. As of 2023, I have active projects in financial mathematics, condensed matter science, and mathematics education. I have nascent projects in other areas and am interested in collaboration with other researchers in almost any area of application.