Alex John Quijano, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Mathematics

Alex John Quijano is an applied mathematician and data scientist who focuses on the study of
natural language evolution. He is interested in understanding diachronic text data utilizing data science. He is also interested in teaching mathematics and statistics incorporating critical analysis of social justice problems. Alex received his B.S. in mathematics from East Tennessee State University, and received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of California Merced. He worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a data science intern and as a machine learning intern. Before joining the University of Portland, Alex was a visiting assistant professor of statistics at Reed College where he taught courses in data science, probability, and statistics. In his graduate work, he developed and used a statistical model that simulates neutral drift evolution to study the word rank evolution of eight languages taken from the Google Ngram corpus dataset. He also applied word embedding/matrix models to quantify word context to study the evolution of hashtag usage on Twitter, particularly the hashtags used for social movements. Born and raised in the Philippines, Alex likes cooking and sharing meals with his family and friends. In his free time, he likes coin collecting and watercolor painting.