Rate My Professor Jelena Schmalz

Dr. Jelena Schmalz is a Lecturer in the School of Science and Technology at the University of New England, within the Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law. She completed her Master of Science in Mathematics at Moscow State Lomonosov University in 1986. In 2005, she moved to Australia and began working at UNE as a casual academic. She earned her PhD in Physics from the University of New England in 2014, with a thesis titled “Investigations of Some Direct and Inverse Problems in X-Ray In-line Phase-Contrast Imaging and Tomography,” supervised by Dr. Konstantin Pavlov at UNE and Dr. Timur Gureyev at Monash University. Since 2017, she has been a member of the discipline of mathematics at UNE. Her interest in tertiary education is based on many years of experience in teaching mathematics.

Dr. Schmalz's research is in applied mathematics, focusing on applications to X-ray imaging and tomography, sport science, and cryptography. She is part of the Mathematical Analysis and Modelling research group. Her teaching includes first-year mathematics, Number Theory, Multivariable Calculus (PMTH412), Introduction to Quantitative Skills (MTHS100), and Elliptic Curves in Cryptography. Key publications include “Phase retrieval using radiation and matter-wave fields: Validity of Teague's method for solution of the transport-of-intensity equation” (Physical Review A, 2011; 77 citations), “On the derivation of the Green’s function for the Helmholtz equation using generalized functions” (American Journal of Physics, 2010; 41 citations), “Phase-contrast X-ray tomography using Teague’s method” (Optics Express, 2012; 7 citations), “Quantized hard-x-ray phase vortices nucleated by aberrated nanolenses” (Physical Review A, 2011; 10 citations), “How are we progressing with academic numeracy at regional universities? Perspectives from first-year undergraduate studies” (Mathematics Education Research Journal, 2020; 9 citations), “Bite Size Maths: Building Mathematics Low Socioeconomic Student Capability in Regional/Remote Australia” (2017), “An examination of the security of the TR-31 and AS 2805 schemes” (2023), “Modelling Human Gait using a Nonlinear Differential Equation” (2021), and “Keyed S-boxes from sponge functions” (2024). Her publications have received 118 citations on ResearchGate.