Dr. Rongjie Lai received his B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China, in 2003, his M.S. degree in mathematics from the Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006 and his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2010. Before he joined RPI in 2014, Dr. Lai held visiting assistant professor positions at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, respectively.
 
Dr. Lai’s research interests are mainly in developing mathematical and computational tools for analyzing and processing signals, images as well as unorganized data using methods of variational partial differential equations, computational differential geometry and learning.  His research further extends to the design of efficient numerical methods to solve variational PDEs and optimization problems. Dr. Lai’s research has wide applications in medical imaging, brain mapping, computer graphics, as well as their extensions to data science. In 2018, Dr. Lai was granted an NSF CAREER award for his research in geometry and learning for manifold-structured data in 3D and higher dimension.