Fern Hunt is a research mathematician in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Division of the Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory. The division consists of 20 individuals with a variety of backgrounds in the physical and mathematical sciences - most are mathematicians or computer scientists. The purpose of the Laboratory as a whole is to provide mathematical and computational support to the more than 1500 physicists and engineers at NIST who conduct research on the composition and performance of complex materials, developing very high precision techniques for the standards and measurements associated with these studies. The results of this research plays an important role in enhancing the ability of U.S. industry to develop and manufacture complex materials that meet the cost and competition standards of the market of today and the likely future. But what does this mean to the mathematician at NIST day to day? The actual work involves applying mathematical techniques to analyze problems coming from NIST research and this often means problems coming from fields which are not usually part of a mathematician's training. Recently for example, Fern worked on a mathematical model of the Barkhausen Effect - a technique used to characterize the ferromagnetic materials used in disk drives and ATM cards - after hearing about it for the first time a month earlier. Reworking an earlier model developed by Robert McMichaels, the physicist she worked with on the project, she used existing mathematics, in this case the theory of reversible Markov Chains, to explain some experimental and numerical observations that were not captured by an earlier model.

Being a mathematician in a scientific but nonacademic environment means frequent collaborations with non-mathematicians and the lack of rigid departmental lines, which makes it easier to collaborate than it would be in a university. The research however is more directed than it would be in academia. Nevertheless, Fern thinks it is very important in a job that demands creativity and a broad command of techniques in analysis and applied mathematics to continue to do mathematical research that doesn't have immediate application to a NIST project. In her case she does work in the area of ergodic theory of dynamical systems. Fern has a Ph.D. and an M.S. from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and an A.B. degree from Bryn Mawr College. Before joining NIST she taught in the Mathematics Department at Howard University and had earlier positions at the University of Utah and City College of New York. She still enjoys teaching and she is currently developing an adjunct course in probability and stochastic processes that she hopes to teach at a local university.

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