Department of Mathematics
University of British Columbia
1984 Mathematics Road
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2
Email: vicval@math.ubc.ca
Anything and everything on this page represents only my personal views and does not represent the views of my former, current, or future institutions and employers.
Generally, a subfield of applied mathematics starts out as a service discipline intended to help improve upon certain scientific methods. At this stage, the research mostly consists of quantifiable improvements of existing algorithms and modeling tools in speed and accuracy. However, at a certain point, the burden of ideas floating in the Platonic unconscious becomes too much to bear — the mathematicians revolt — the foundations are reassessed, and a rich collection of new theories and generalizations is synthesized with graphite, overpriced chalk, and electrical current.
Over the past decade, this mathematical tour de force has reached and terrorized the shores of computational chemistry and force field parametrization. The approximation of potential energy landscapes of atomistic conformations has been reformulated as a problem in functional analysis, and the growing compute capabilities and large-scale dataset creation efforts allowed this idea to sail into more practical waters. In 2025, I joined the Department of Mathematics at UBC to assist this insurgency of idealists under the supervision of Prof. Christoph Ortner.
Here's a recent CV.
More stuff coming soon... I have some ideas about mid/long-range many-body interactions...
Klyshko E, Kim JS-H, McGough L, Valeeva V, Lee E, Ranganathan R, Rauscher S (2024). Functional protein dynamics in a crystal. Nature Communications 15(1):3244.
I have worked as a teaching assistant for the following courses:
University of British Columbia
University of Toronto
Some pictures: gallery.