Former Applied Mathematics faculty member Vakhtang Putkaradze was featured in the SIAM News on a joint article "Control and Integrability in Figure Skating"

Dr. Putkaradze came to UNM in 1999 as an Asistant Professor, received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004 and left to Colorado State University in Fort Collins in 2005. In 2012 he moved to Canada as a Centennial Professor at the University of Alberta where he was also a PIMS Site Director until 2019. He  is currently  the Vice President of Transformation, Science, and Technology at ATCO. His research interests lie in analysis and study of nonlinear models in physical systems. Most of his work has been in applications of nonlinear and geometric methods to physical systems.