Dr. Don Hong, Professor of the Department of Mathematical Science, earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Texas A&M University and finished his postdoctoral training at the University of Texas-Austin in Computational Mathematics. Before taking a full professor faculty position at MTSU, he was a tenured full professor at East Tennessee State University and served as the director of actuarial mathematics program. He has also held Visiting Professor positions at the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Biostatistics of Vanderbilt University, as well as internship at Texas Department of Insurance.

Dr. Hong was nominated for Career Achievement Award in the years of 2018-2020 and a Recipient of 2009 Distinguished Faculty Research Award from MTSU Foundation. His research areas include Approximation Theory, Splines and Wavelets, Medical Data Analysis, and Computational Statistics. Dr. Hong has published two books and about 60 research articles in leading journals. His research results were cited by scientists all over the world. He has been invited to speak at national and international conferences, as well as in colloquia at many prestigious schools including Emory University, Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Vanderbilt University. He was invited to serve as MS-Math program reviewer for Sam Houston State University (SHSU) in 2017 and PhD Dissertation Reviewer for Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 2018 & 2020, respectively. He served as a panel reviewer for the National Institute of Health (NIH) programs of Bioinformatics with Software Development and Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research, as well as a proposal reviewer for National Science Foundation (NSF), the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong, Kentucky Science and Engineering Program, SHSU Research Foundation, and Florida Lytmos Reviewer Portal, among others. In addition to having been a guest editor of three mathematical journals, he is currently serving on the editorial boards of Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, International Journal of Mathematics and Computer Science, and the Current Development in Theory and Applications of Wavelets, and has served as a referee for more than 40 journals. He has received over $1M research funding support from HHS, NSF, NSA, CASE, and other agencies/organizations. in 2021, he received an Individual Research Competition Grant from the Casualty Actuarial Socioey (CAS) on Predictive Modeling by Incorporating Textual Information.

Dr. Hong serves as the director of the Actuarial Science Program. In 2020, MTSU Actuarial Science Program received International Recognition by winning the CAS University Award.  Dr. Hong is an active faculty member in the Ph.D. program of Computational Sciences (COMS).  Three Ph.D. students in COMS, under his direct supervision as the Chair of Dissertation Committee, graduated in 2014, 2016, and 2017, respectively, have become tenure-track assistant professor in the fields of Mathematical Sciences, Computer Science, and Data Science in the US colleges/universities. He dedicates his time to supervise MS Thesis and Undergraduate Research as well. One of his MS-Math student has won the 2011 Master’s Thesis Award for Digital Scholarship from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools that became the only MTSU graduate student to have earned this honor thus far. Dr. Hong has organized several special sessions for the American Math Society (AMS) and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), as well as organized workshops on MTSU campus under grant support from NSF and NSA, and hosted a conference for the Casualty Actuaries of Southeast (CASE).  

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