User:Churn and change/sandbox

Early life and career

Bertozzi was born to William Bertozzi, a physicist, and Norma Bertozzi, in 1965 in Massachusetts. Her father is a physicist and currently a professor at MIT. She would have two younger sisters: Carolyn, a year younger, who would become a professor of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley, and Diana, who would become an occupational therapist. Andrea grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and finished high school in 1983. She then went to Princeton, and settled on math, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1987, a master's in 1988, and a PhD in 1991 with Andy Majda as her advisor. She married Brad Koetje, an engineer and an international consultant for energy companies, in the 1990s.

Bertozzi's career started as a postdoc and an instructor at the University of Chicago, where she stayed for four years. She took a year off to work at the Argonne National lab in 1995, and then moved to Duke University as a tenured associate professor. She left Duke and joined the University of California, Los Angeles, in . She has stayed at UCLA since th

Work

Flow dynamics modeling

Bertozzi has worked on math modeling of oil spills by models using a mixture of oil and beads, simulating sand, flowing down a slope. Her lab has created computer models of how oil flows ahead of sand in structures called fingers, using lasers to track the flow. The nature of the flow depends on slope angle, grain size of the sand, and oil thickness, with various particles in the fluid interacting via physical forces and shaping the flow. The work has been used to analyze the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Sources

• Applied math lab joins scientists working on oil cleanup in the Gulf. University of California, Los Angeles, Today: Faculty and Staff News. 2012.
• Morrow, C.; Perl, T. (1998). Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 9780313291319.