Kristiana Nakaj - Applied Math & Data

About

I’ve always been drawn to figuring things out, and math is the best tool I’ve found for it. My interest grew from seeing patterns everywhere, from everyday observations to complex datasets. I see math as a practical way to make sense of a messy problem and build a solution that actually works—a process I really enjoy. This curiosity has shaped my academic path, leading me to my current graduate work at Virginia Tech.

Experience

Instructor & Teaching Assistant

Virginia Tech, Johns Hopkins & Berea College

Directed course curriculum and provided instructional support across foundational mathematics courses for undergraduate and gifted middle/high school students.

Research & Development

Berea College & Runestone Academy

Applied computer vision and ML to identify constellations in astronomical imagery, and contributed to full-stack development for an open-source textbook platform.

Projects & Papers

Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) Estimation with AI/ML

Collaborated with Raytheon at the SIAM MPI Workshop to enhance signal processing methods using machine learning, investigating the MUSIC algorithm and COSnet neural network.

Machine Learning Signal Processing Industry Workshop

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Comparative Study of Noise-Aware DMD Methods

A comparative study of three noise-aware Dynamic Mode Decomposition methods (ncDMD, fbDMD, tlsDMD) on synthetic systems to balance bias correction and performance.

Dynamic Mode Decomposition Numerical Methods Class Project

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Risk Sharing in Insurance

An investigation into mathematical models of risk sharing in insurance, extending classical models and proposing new rules based on deductibles and quantiles.

Actuarial Science Financial Mathematics SIAM Workshop

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Modeling Repressor Dynamics in E. coli

Developed and extended a deterministic model of the lac operon system using ordinary differential equations to study repressor dynamics and cooperativity.

Biomathematics Differential Equations Class Project

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Pólya's Random Walk Theorem

Undergraduate capstone paper discussing the direct counting proof for Pólya's theorem, examining recurrence and transience properties of random walks on d-dimensional lattices.

Probability Theory Stochastic Processes Capstone Paper

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