South Asian Americans in Higher Education: Background and Future Directions

South Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States. Though research has broadly attended to Asian Americans as an aggregate racial or ethnic group, calls to specify the complex experiences and identities within this group have increased. This is particularly true for South Asian Americans, or Desi, groups as their ethnic and cultural identities have been increasingly scrutinized and racialized since September 11th. This backgrounder discusses South Asian Americans within higher educational institutions. More specifically, I provide an overview of identity development models, contextualize their unique challenges, and relate these models to South Asian Americans. The backgrounder concludes by outlining opportunities for supporting South Asian American students in higher education.Educatio

Eliminating flutter for clamped von Karman plates immersed in subsonic flows

We address the long-time behavior of a non-rotational von Karman plate in an inviscid potential flow. The model arises in aeroelasticity and models the interaction between a thin, nonlinear panel and a flow of gas in which it is immersed [6, 21, 23]. Recent results in [16, 18] show that the plate component of the dynamics (in the presence of a physical plate nonlinearity) converge to a global compact attracting set of finite dimension; these results were obtained in the absence of mechanical damping of any type. Here we show that, by incorporating mechanical damping the full flow-plate system, full trajectories---both plate and flow---converge strongly to (the set of) stationary states. Weak convergence results require "minimal" interior damping, and strong convergence of the dynamics are shown with sufficiently large damping. We require the existence of a "good" energy balance equation, which is only available when the flows are subsonic. Our proof is based on first showing the convergence properties for regular solutions, which in turn requires propagation of initial regularity on the infinite horizon. Then, we utilize the exponential decay of the difference of two plate trajectories to show that full flow-plate trajectories are uniform-in-time Hadamard continuous. This allows us to pass convergence properties of smooth initial data to finite energy type initial data. Physically, our results imply that flutter (a non-static end behavior) does not occur in subsonic dynamics. While such results were known for rotational (compact/regular) plate dynamics [14] (and references therein), the result presented herein is the first such result obtained for non-regularized---the most physically relevant---models

Higher spin polynomial solutions of quantum Knizhnik--Zamolodchikov equation

We provide explicit formulae for highest-weight to highest-weight correlation functions of perfect vertex operators of $U_q(\hat{\mathfrak{sl}(2)})$ at arbitrary integer level $\ell$. They are given in terms of certain Macdonald polynomials. We apply this construction to the computation of the ground state of higher spin vertex models, spin chains (spin $\ell/2$ XXZ) or loop models in the root of unity case $q=-e^{-i\pi/(\ell+2)}$