Professor Newton received his B.S. (cum laude) degree in Applied Mathematics/Physics at Harvard University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in 1986 from the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. He then moved to the Mathematics Department at Stanford University as a Postdoctoral Fellow working with J.B. Keller. He became Assistant (1987) and Associate Professor (1993) in the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) and at the Center for Complex Systems Research (CCSR) at the Beckman Institute. In 1993 he moved to the Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Department and the Mathematics Department at the University of Southern California and was promoted to Full Professor in 1998.
Trained as an applied mathematician, Professor Newton’s work focuses on developing mathematical models for nonlinear dynamical processes in continuum mechanics and biophysics, currently focusing mostly on mathematical oncology and systems biology. He has held visiting appointments at Caltech, Brown, Hokkaido University, The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at U.C. Santa Barbara, and The Scripps Research Institute where he was head of the Mathematical Modeling Group in the Scripps Physical Sciences Oncology Center funded by the National Cancer Institute (2009-2014). He is currently a Professor of Applied Mathematics, Engineering, Quantitative and Computational Biology, and Medicine in the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Keck School of Medicine, and a founding affiliate member of the LJ Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Nonlinear Science (SpringerNature) and was elected AAAS Fellow (Mathematics) in 2020 for outstanding contributions in applied mathematics, mathematical oncology, and the development of nonlinear dynamical systems models of the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations and Guggenheim Fellow in 2024 in Applied Mathematics.
