Rate My Professor Christopher Strickland

Christopher Strickland serves as an Associate Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, holding an adjunct appointment in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Specializing in mathematical ecology, his research develops mathematics to model and analyze how behavioral patterns and species-environment interactions give rise to population dynamics. Current projects include epidemic modeling of substance use disorders such as opioid and alcohol addiction, wind- and water-mediated organismal dispersal under various behavioral regimes, pattern formation in locust swarms, and multiscale fluid-structure interactions in biological systems like gorgonians. He leads the Strickland Lab at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, mentoring graduate and undergraduate researchers using computational approaches including Python, MATLAB, Git, dynamical systems analysis, statistical inference, and GPU-accelerated scientific computing for interdisciplinary collaborations with ecologists, biologists, and engineers.

Strickland earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Colorado State University in 2013, advised by Gerhard Dangelmayr and Patrick Shipman. He held a three-year postdoctoral position in applied mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, ending in 2017. His earlier education includes an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida in 2007 and a B.S. in Mathematics with a B.A. in French, summa cum laude, from the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi in 2005. He joined the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department in August 2017 and was promoted to Associate Professor in August 2023. Key publications encompass "Consequences of intraspecific variation in seed dispersal for plant demography, communities, evolution and global change" (AoB Plants, 2019), "The total dispersal kernel: a review and future directions" (AoB Plants, 2019), "Modeling the prescription opioid epidemic" (Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 2019), "IB2d: a Python and MATLAB implementation of the immersed boundary method" (Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 2017), "A data-driven mathematical model of the heroin and fentanyl epidemic in Tennessee" (Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 2021), and "Structural instability and linear allocation control in generalized models of substance use disorder" (Mathematical Biosciences, 2024).