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Song-Ping Zhu BS Huazhong
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Graduating from Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Wuhan, China in January of 1982 with a Bachelor of Engineering Mechanics, Dr. Song-Ping Zhu went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A., where he earned his Master of Science in Engineering (Applied Mechanics) degree in May, 1985, Master of Science in Applied Mathematics in May, 1988 and Ph.D in Fluid Mechanics in December, 1987. His dissertation entitled “Open Channel Flow Near the Resonance Speed” was completed under the supervision of the late Professor C.-S. Yih, who was the Stephen P. Timoshenko University Professor of Fluid Mechanics.
Upon graduating from The University of Michigan, Dr. Song-Ping Zhu
took a Research Fellow position at the Centre for Water Research, The
University of Western Australia and worked there for two years before moving to
the Department of Mathematics, The University of Wollongong, Australia in
January, 1991 to take a Lecturer position. He was promoted to a Senior Lecturer
at the beginning of 1995 and then to an Associate Professor at the beginning of
1997. In 2007, he was promoted to full professor, an honour that has only been given
to a small number of faculty members at the
Having published over 90 papers in international journals and conference proceedings and attracted funding for several research projects from ARC and private industries, Professor Zhu's research interests are primarily in following four dynamically inter-related areas:
1) Mathematical and Computational
Finance:
Developing suitable analytical and numerical techniques for pricing exotic options. Particularly interested in the pricing of various financial derivatives such as American options, Parisian options, variance swaps and convertible bonds.
2) Nonlinear Wave Theory,
Wave Modelling and Fluid Dynamics:
Studying nonlinear waves generated behind floating and submerged objects and their interactions and using finite element and boundary element methods to model ocean and coastal water waves (reflection, diffraction and refraction). Modelling wave field around an OWC device, which is an interesting new area in renewable energy (using ocean waves to generate electricity and/or desalinizing sea water).
3) Computational
Mathematics:
Further developing numerical techniques such as boundary element techniques and dual reciprocity boundary element method to solve partial differential equations and singular integral equations.
4) Computational
Fluid Dynamics and Industrial Modelling:
Developing mathematical models and suitable numerical methods to solve industry-related fluid flow and heat transfer problems, in particular, problems related to the transport of pollutant, the control of water quality and clean-up of the spilled oil in an open ocean.
Professor Zhu was appointed at the beginning of the 1997 as a Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering. He was one of the two co-Chairmen of the 35th Annual Australia-New Zealand Applied Mathematics Conference held at the Mollymook, NSW in February of 1999. He is currently on the editorial board of five international journals. He is the Director of the Centre for Mathematical Finance and the Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Applied Statistics, while he remains to be a member of Centre for Engineering and Applied Mathematics.
Recently, Professor Zhu has published an important paper in his academic career; he has found an exact and explicit analytical solution for American options with constant interest rate and volatility (the paper has been published in Quantitative Finance, 2006, Vol. 6, No. 3, 229-242). This work was a breakthrough since finding such a solution is one of the notoriously difficult problems in pricing American options and it has long been regarded as “impossible” among researchers in the area. As a result, he has given several invited keynote speeches and seminars and this solution was also quickly mentioned on Wikipedia and some official government website (e.g. Australian Department of Education's website).