Two University of Houston-Victoria assistant professors are using $10,000 summer grants from the university to advance their research about financial liquidity and number theory.
Alexandre Aidov, an assistant professor of finance in the UHV School of Business Administration, and Jerry Hu, an assistant professor of mathematics in the UHV School of Arts & Sciences, are this summer’s grant recipients.
UHV has given the awards the past eight summers to junior faculty pursuing promising research projects. Junior faculty members are those who are on a tenure track but are not yet tenured. A committee of tenured UHV professors evaluates proposals and then recommends who receives the awards.
“UHV encourages junior faculty members to conduct research, and we realize some projects need a financial boost to get rolling,” said Don Smith, UHV interim provost and vice president for academic affairs. “The summer research grants have been a success in providing money to launch many interesting projects. I’m excited to learn about Dr. Aidov’s and Dr. Hu’s findings.”
Aidov has taught several finance classes at UHV since joining the faculty in 2013. Much of his research focuses on market liquidity and trading. Liquidity is the measure of an ability to trade an asset quickly and at a fair market value.
He said he was ecstatic to receive the grant. The money has been useful in acquiring market data.
“Research grants not only help faculty members produce high-quality research, but also help classroom performance through student engagement and application,” Aidov said. “We can tell students that whatever they are learning in class has outside applications.”
Aidov explores the behavior of liquidity across different assets and the effect of different market changes. For example, if a market went from trading eight hours a day to trading 24 hours a day, there would be an impact on liquidity. Aidov analyzes that impact.
Aidov is compiling a paper on what he has found and hopes to send it to high-quality academic journals.
“It’s going well,” he said. “I have an interesting data set that examines different asset classes, such as oil and gold.”
Hu is exploring statistical aspects of various problems in number theory. The work involves relatively prime numbers, which are two numbers that have no common factors other than 1. For instance, seven and 20 are relatively prime numbers because they can’t be divided by the same number other than 1. Hu is investigating several problems involving the probabilities of relative primality and its high dimensional generalization.
“The grant is a nice boost to get me going on this research, which should allow me to apply for external research grants to continue the projects,” Hu said. “It’s great the university provides the time and financial support to allow junior faculty members to work on their research.”
Hu said he already has gotten some partial results from the research. While the questions he is exploring are difficult, he thinks he is on the right track.
“The results of Dr. Hu’s research have the potential to enrich research in number theory,” said Li Chao, chair of the UHV School of Arts & Sciences Science, Technology and Mathematics Division. “I am impressed with Dr. Hu’s enthusiasm and diligence in his research.”