IMPACT

Ron Schoenheit (B.S. Mathematics ’65) is the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award for his accomplishments that have brought honor, distinction and visibility to the College of Science.

Judy Faucett, recipient of the College of Science 2021 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, founded the Rise Scholarship – the first scholarship at Oregon State exclusively serving students with disabilities.

Five incoming graduate students were awarded 2021-2022 ARCS Foundation Oregon Chapter scholarships. This year, ARCS Oregon is supporting a record number of 79 scholars: 25 at OHSU, 44 at OSU and 10 at UO.

Genomics pioneer Michael Waterman (Mathematics ’64, ’66) receives the 2021 Lifetime Achievement in Science Award for his remarkable accomplishments that have brought honor, distinction and visibility to Oregon State University.

The College of Science welcomes Swati Patel and Axel Saenz Rodriguez who joined the Department of Mathematics as tenure-track assistant professors in September.

Peter Banwarth (M.S. ’12) is an epidemiologist and public health data scientist with the Benton County Health Department in Oregon. He has developed models to guide county health policies on testing, safety and health measures for employees and the public to minimize infections and deaths in Corvallis and nearby areas.

Professor of mathematics Holly Swisher was awarded a NSF grant to investigate a number of problems that relate to modular and automorphic forms, which have played a central role in many major problems in number theory over the last century.

The McGraths put their knowledge of numbers to use and leveraged a qualified charitable distribution (QCD) to make a major gift to their alma mater while realizing a significant tax benefit.

“The QCD is the Holy Grail of donating,” Sue said. “Many of our friends didn’t know about it until we described it to them..."

The College of Science will graduate 670 undergraduate students with baccalaureate degrees in 2020-21, including 68 Honors graduates.

Jennifer Smucker, mathematics senior, heads to Virginia Tech in the fall to pursue a Ph.D. in math. She hopes to be a role model for other women in STEM.

Alumni profile of Epidemiologist and public health data scientist Peter Banwarth.

The OSU Pi Mu Epsilon chapter honored and inducted 33 undergraduates, who have shown exceptional scholarly activity in mathematics, into the national mathematics honor society.

Two students from the College of Science have been awarded the competitive 2021 Goldwater awards.

Malgo Peszynska, professor of applied mathematics at Oregon State University, has received the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Geosciences Career Prize.

The OSU Math Club has been instrumental in keeping the undergraduate student community connected.

The 2020 OSU Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, directed by Prof. Holly Swisher, was a great success!

In recognition of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, held on February 11, we acknowledge the women faculty, students and alumnae of the OSU College of Science.

Genomics pioneer Dr. Michael Waterman (’64, ’66) has received the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics. Waterman, a distinguished College of Science alumnus, is widely regarded as a trailblazer in computational biology. His work in the 1980s formed one of the theoretical cornerstones for many DNA mapping and sequencing projects, including the Human Genome Project.

At Oregon State, Scott Clark (08) was able to pursue majors in physics, mathematics and computational physics all at once. Today he is the CEO and co-founder of SigOpt.

Malgorzata Peszynska, elected in the section on Mathematics, is the 18^th faculty member in the College of Science to be elected as AAAS Fellow.

Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics, or TRACE-COVID-19, was launched by OSU in April 2020 with door-to-door sampling in Corvallis and expanded to other cities around the state while also adding a wastewater testing component. In December, OSU received a $2 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to create a national TRACE Center that will expand the OSU’s COVID-19 public health project to other states.

The Mathematics department welcomed 15 new graduate students

New associate dean announced.

Congratulations to Mary Beisiegel who has been awarded two new National Science Foundation grants!

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has placed mathematical models in the spotlight as they have become central to public health interventions, planning, resource allocation and forecasts.

Congratulations to Vrushali Bokil and Nathan Gibson, who were awarded $225K funding from NSF’s Computational Mathematics program for their project "Computational and Multi-Scale Methods for Nonlinear Electromagnetic Models in Plasmas and Nanocomposites".

The Mathematics Department is pleased to welcome into our community two new fixed-term assistant professors, Patrik Nabelek and Kristen Vroom, as well as two new instructors, Samaneh Yourdkhani and Stacey Vaughn.

The College of Science is proud to announce that 41 science students have received summer undergraduate research awards.

Congratulations to the following faculty for receiving promotions and /or tenure for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Megan Tucker will graduate next month with a substantial amount of research experience under her belt: She was awarded the Mickey Leland Energy Fellowship, which gave her the opportunity to work on an interdisciplinary team at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Albany, Oregon, during the summer of 2019. The new knowledge gained from her internship helped her land a job as a technical writer with Amazon Web Services — a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments.

The Department of Mathematics at Oregon State University (OSU) recently hosted the seventh annual Cascade Regional Applied Interdisciplinary and Numerical Mathematics (RAIN) Meeting.

The NUMS steering committee, along with the PiMUC organizers, were determined to hold the line during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The mathematics department welcomed new instructors in 2019-2020.

The 2019-2020 Larry Martin and Joyce B. O’Neill Fellowship was awarded to fifth-year mathematics Ph.D. student Choah Shin for high achievement in computational modeling.

Mathematics graduate student Ruby Chick pursues interdisciplinary research on microplastics through the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Program at Oregon State University.

How are devastating plant diseases spread? Is there a better way to predict HIV prevalence in a city? How can we detect toxic algae blooms before they occur? And which of the thousands of metal-organic frameworks can be used for storing and separating gases, like CO2 from industrial plants? Four faculty members received College of Science Research and Innovation Seed (SciRIS-II) awards this February to pursue answers to these questions over the course of the next year.