Sangmin Park holds his award.

Sangmin Park Earns the Guy C. Berry Graduate Research Award

By Amy Pavlak Laird Email Amy Pavlak Laird

Heidi Opdyke

In the late 18th century, mathematician Gaspard Monge dug into dirt. He wrote a paper that posed a problem: how to move a pile of dirt to a hole of equal volume with minimal total effort.

Today, Carnegie Mellon University’s Sangmin Park uses the mathematics underpinning that transport problem as a tool for research in applied mathematics.

Park, a Ph.D. candidate in the Mellon College of Science’s Department of Mathematical Sciences, applies the theory of optimal transport to study interesting questions at the interface of partial differential equations and data science.

“It turns out this problem gives rise to beautiful mathematical structures,” Park said. “Some part of it can be very pure and beautiful, and some part of it can be very useful for downstream applications.”

Optimal transport theory has a wealth of applications both within and beyond mathematics, including in fields such as image processing, data science, and machine learning.

While some of the mathematical tools Park works on are more theoretical, he’s especially drawn to problems that have a connection to an application outside of math.

“That's why I started doing math in the first place,” he said.

As an undergraduate, Park intended to major in international relations and philosophy. But he discovered that he wanted to study something more quantitative and precise.

“It's quite enjoyable to look for that precise understanding of anything, whatever you're interested in,” he said. “And I think math is a very useful language for that.”

Park credits his advisor, Mathematics Professor Dejan Slepčev, with nurturing his interest in optimal transport. Together they have co-authored two papers, one on the geometry and analytic properties of the Sliced Wasserstein space, which appeared in the Journal of Functional Analysis, and another on boundary estimation from point clouds, which was published in the Journal of Scientific Computing.

“The work that we did together is exciting and leads to both new explanations and advances theoretical developments,” Slepčev said.

“Sangmin has a genuine curiosity about math,” he added. “And he’s very efficient in following that curiosity and providing results about the things that interest him.”

Park’s interests are broad. During his graduate studies, he worked on four completely disparate projects, including a collaboration with Emeritus Mathematics Professor Robert Pego on convergence and non-convergence in a nonlocal gradient flow.

Park has given several invited talks, including at a workshop on optimal transport and dynamics hosted by the Banff International Research Station at the Casa Matemática Oaxaca. This workshop brought together experts to discuss connections between optimal allocation of resources, fluid flow, and modeling the early universe.

Since 2022, Park has been president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Student Chapter at Carnegie Mellon. He has helped organize social events, seminars and working groups for current students. He also has been involved with prospective student visits, including attending several departmental open houses, lunches, and Zoom info sessions.

After earning his Ph.D. this spring, Park will begin a postdoctoral appointment at Caltech, where he will be involved in interdisciplinary research.

Park is the 2025 recipient of the Guy C. Berry Graduate Research Award.

The award recognizes excellence in research by MCS graduate students and was established in 2005. Guy C. Berry, emeritus university professor of chemistry, is widely recognized as a leader in rheology and light scattering of polymers. Rheology, a branch of mechanics, is the study of those properties of materials that determine their response to mechanical force. Berry has a long history of outstanding contributions to the literature in experimental fluid physics using mechanical methods and light scattering, as well as in theoretical concepts of the rheology and thermodynamics of complex fluids. His work has advanced the study of important issues in the conformation and dynamics of macromolecules.