Abstract. The boundary effects and thermal effects play crucial roles in real life applications. These problem give formidable challenges to the mathematical analysis and numerical simulations. I will demonstrate the difficulties and subtleties by looking at these effects in various general diffusion dynamics.

Bio. Chun Liu is the Chair and Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics in Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Before coming to Illinois Tech, Liu was in the Department of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, where he had served since 1998. He also served a term as associate director for the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA) at the University of Minnesota, and has held positions at many institutions, such as the University of Wuerzburg, the University of Tokyo, the University of Georgia, and Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He has been serving on the editorial board of numerous journals, such as SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis, Communications in Mathematical Sciences, and Interfaces and Free Boundaries.