Mathematics

Oregon State faculty and students showed strong presence in numbers and in quality of research presentations in thematic sessions and posters at the Second Biennial Meeting of SIAM Pacific Northwest Section held at Seattle University the weekend October 18-20, 2019. See picture (courtesy of Blaec Bejarano) featuring current and former OSU Mathematics grads and faculty: Naren Vohra, Nachuan Zhang, Sooie-Hoe Loke, Tuan Pham, JJ Zeng, Ralph Showalter, Choah Shin, Yi Zhang, Lisa Bigler, Malgo Peszynska, Patrik Nabelek, Evan Rajbhandari, Dallas Foster, Blaec Bejarano, Radu Dascaliuc, and Alireza Hosseinkhan. Not present in this photo are Robert Higdon, Thomas Humphries, Adel Faridani and Enrique Thomann who also attended.

Please join me in congratulating Ruby chick. Ruby has been awarded a fellowship by the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NSF-NRT) program in " Risk and Uncertainty Quantification in Marine Science " program at Oregon State University for the 2019-2020 academic year. Ruby will be participating in the project on " A Systems-based Understanding of Microplastic Impacts on Ecological and Human Health ". Ruby's masters research is on understanding the endocrine system and its dysfunction in mamals. Within this NRT project, she will participate in collaboratively producing a systems based model, with other graduate students, that predicts the most impactful sources of plastic pollution to gain an understanding of biological and ecological systems, and how they influence one another. As part of this NRT Fellowship, Ruby will also be fully funded to participate in a summer internship in industry or a government lab. Congratulations Ruby!

Huanqun Jiang has accepted an appointment as a Research Associate in the Department of Statistics & Probability at Michigan State University for this fall. He will be working with Frederi Viens, Chair of the Department of Statistics & Probability, and his primary research duty will be in connection with an award from the Office of Naval Research, in collaboration with Prof. Philip Ernst from Rice University.

Five OSU Mathematics graduate students will participate in a workshop of the NSF-funded program "Transforming Instruction in Undergraduate Mathematics via Primary Historical Sources". The workshop will take place July 19, 20 at New Mexico State University (NMSU). The program creates student projects for use in the undergraduate mathematics classroom which teaches content based around primary historical sources: https://blogs.ursinus.edu/triumphs/ [blogs.ursinus.edu]. The OSU graduate students who will attend the July workshop at NMSU are Adaline De Chenne, Sarah Erickson, Sarah Hagen, Branwen Purdy, and Naveen Somasunderam. In Fall 2018 Sarah Hagen used several of the primary source projects in teaching a "boot camp" for incoming OSU graduate students. She will make a one-hour featured presentation at the workshop, which is co-organized by OSU Professor David Pengelley.

Ruby Chick has received funding to participate in in the Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling Camp at the University of Delaware, which will be held from June 12-15. Congratulations to Ruby!

Keith Schloeman has been appointed Chair of the Mathematics Department at Chemeketa Community College. Keith received his MS in Mathematics from OSU in 2009 and served as an Instructor and Academic Advisor here in the OSU Mathematics Department until 2014. Congratulations Keith!

The results from the 2019 COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling are in. The COMAP contest is an international, team based, undergraduate, mathematical modeling competition. Teams of up to three students write up a thorough solution approach within 4 days. Submissions are judged on the basis of scientific merits as well as clarity and organization of the written report. This year, 14,108 teams representing institutions from seventeen countries/regions participated in the contest. One of our teams, consisting of Andrea Lanz, Sara Tro and Michael Kupperman, was awarded Meritorious Winner! This corresponds to the top 7% internationally. Only 42 teams did better! Other Successful Participants from OSU include Elaine Swanson, Max Morrow, Christine Wong, Rachel Sousa, Megan Tucker and Sean Pitman. Congratulations to all of our participants. This year’s contest ran from Thursday, January 24 to Monday, January 28, 2019. During that time, teams researched, modeled, and submitted a solution to one...

Mathematics PhD student Brady Bowen, Visiting Assistant Professor Blessing Emerenini,and Professor Vrushali Bokil will be participating and giving talks at the Fifth International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Population Dynamics in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA during May 19-24, 2019. Bowen, Emerenini and Bokil will all give invited talks in the minisymposium, " Recent Advances in Epidemiological Modeling Arising from Human, Animal and Plant Communities ", co-organized by Vrushali Bokil, Blessing Emerenini and Frederic Hamelin, Associate Professor, Department of Ecology, Agrocampus Ouest, INRA and University of Rennes in Rennes, France.

The National Science Foundation awarded a new grant "Modeling with Constraints and Phase Transitions in Porous Media" DMS-1912938 of $224K for 2019-2022 to Malgorzata Peszynska as Principal Investigator. With her collaborators and students they will develop new mathematical results as well as continue interdisciplinary modeling efforts. The project is motivated by the multiscale dynamics in the Earth's environment which requires further insights into the coupled processes of energy and mass transport across the several interlinked spatial and temporal scales including the pore-scale. The project will address mathematical and computational challenges arising in the models of phase change in porous media such as permafrost, sub-sea sediments, geysers or geothermal reservoirs, and the evolution and migration of the fluids as the phase change occurs in response to the increased temperature or mechanical disturbance.