OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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Math Majors, Friends, Family, and Colleagues, Please join us Friday, June 11, any time between 10:00am-Noon for the first ever Mathematics Department Pre-Commencement Processional Brunch. To get ready for the Celebratory Processional from campus down to Reser Stadium that begins at 12:30, please drop by the lawn outside the MSLC on the south side of Kidder Hall. Light brunch-worthy refreshments will be served, including beverages. To celebrate reopening and graduation, all faculty, staff, and students are invited, plus families of grads. Grads from 2020 and 2021 are especially invited!! Please invite your loved ones. No need to RSVP. Processional marchers are encouraged to wear cap-n-gown if you wish. Photo ops galore! In case of rain, we’ll jump inside to the MSLC, so bring a mask for in case.
New feature articles have been posted by the newsletter/media committee and are now published on the Math Website. These are: Pi Mu Epsilon Induction Ceremony Oregon Beta chapter honors 33 inductees with ceremony Persistent math major heads off to grad school Jennifer Smucker leaves behind the combine to pave a path Epidemiologist and public health data scientist Alumnus Peter Banwarth develops models to help guide Benton County's Covid response Math double major wins Goldwater Scholarship Emily Gemmill among winners of prestigious award for undergraduate research Peszynska receives prestigious Geosciences Career Prize The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics honors Professor Peszynska
Congratulations to Sebastian Naranjo Alvarez for obtaining a new postdoctoral position! Sebastian defended his PhD dissertation in Winter 2021. Sebastian will be starting as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca in Italy. He has recently published two co-authored papers in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory. The first is a paper titled, The virtual element method for resistive magnetohydrodynamics , which is now published online in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering , volume 381, 1 August 2021. Also, see the arxiv site . A second is a book chapter that will be published by Springer. Here is a link to the arxiv site for the chapter.
Elaine Swanson, post baccalaureate student in the mathematical biology option, was selected for a STudent Academic Research Review award for 2020-2021 by the Oregon NASA Space Grant (OSGC) to work on a project entitled "Creating an aerobic compost tea, fed through a hydroponic system, to sustain plant growth in a small, controlled environmental habitat". Her final presentation of research will be given at the OSGC 2021 Spring Symposium on Friday May 21 (see schedule here ). For this and other accomplishments, Elaine was recently recognized as a Finalist for the 2021 National Space Club and Foundation Keynote Scholarship . The award is given to a high school senior, undergraduate or graduate student with definite plans to pursue a career in the Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) fields. Elaine was a NASA intern with Kennedy Space Center’s crop production team in the summer of 2018. Since then, she has established...
The College of Science has announced that the following faculty have received a promotion and/or tenure for the 2020-21 academic year. Dr. Ben Dalziel will be promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Dr. Hoe Woon Kim will be promoted to Senior Instructor II. Dr. Nathan Gibson will be promoted to Professor. Congratulations to each!
The OSU Chapter of the national mathematics honor society Pi Mu Epsilon will host its annual induction ceremony and celebration (via Zoom) Monday May 17, beginning at 4pm. Professor Melody Alsaker will give an invited lecture on “ Mathematics and the Future of Biomedical Imaging ” beginning at 4:30pm immediately after the ceremony.
A New Faculty Learning Community for Instructors and TAs: The Community for the Advancement of Antiracist Instruction (CAAI) seeks instructors and TAs for a spring pilot, weeks 5 through 8. In this professional development opportunity, participants will explore antiracist teaching in a community of colleagues and create an antiracist teaching action plan. Apply here by March 31.
OSU Mathematics graduate students Rachel Wofford, Lisa Bigler, and Naren Vohra were selected for the prestigious NSF (National Science Foundation) sponsored internships for Summer 2021. Rachel Wofford will work with a lab in New Hampshire on determining how socioeconomic status impacts cancer patients. Lisa Bigler will work on the project "Implicit time-stepping method to solve phase-field equations in a moving frame" at Oak Ridge National Lab. Naren Vohra wil work on "Numerical permafrost model" at the Los Alamos National Lab.The students will receive a weekly stipend but the internships will be conducted virtually. Congratulations to Rachel, Lisa, and Naren! The National Science Foundation (NSF) Mathematical Sciences Graduate Internship (MSGI) program is administered by ORAU through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) under an agreement between NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). ORISE focuses on scientific initiatives including educating the next generation of scientists. More information...
SIAM CSE (Computational Science and Engineering) Conference met virtually March 1-5 and featured strong preence of OSU Mathematics students. PhD students Lisa Bigler, Choah Shin and Naren Vohra and recent PhD alum Sebastian Naranjo gave talks in minisymposia. Lisa and Choah also participated in and were supported by the Broader Engagement program which featured a rich scientific program, mentoring, and career and professional development to students from underrepresented and underprivileged backgrounds who aspire to broaden their experience in research-based professional activities. Choah even served a sa TA in the BE tuorial on "Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++" !!!! There is more: Lisa, Choah and Evan Rajbhandari presented posters; all this in the virtual setting which made the activities both exciting and challenging. Finally, Naren and Nachuan Zhang received conference participation support from SIAM. [SIAM has generously extended financial support for conference participation for graduate students and early career...
A new faculty learning community that focuses on antiracist teaching practices is being planned for Spring 2021. Organized by Raven Chakerian, Filix Maisch, Shawn Massoni, Dan Rockwell, Rachael Cate, and Liddy Deter, this new community of practice (COP) will create a safe space where instructors and GTAs will have agency and feel empowered to explore antiracism in a community of peers of similar ranking. The COP is co-sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Center for Teaching and Learning. More details, including how to participate, will follow soon.
The December 2020 issue of SIAM News features an article co-authored by Nathan Gibson on " Advancing SIAM’s Mission with the COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling ". The article describes the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), organized by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP) and mentions the many ways in which the OSU Mathematics Department has supported and mentored succesful teams since 2006.
The December 2020 Issue of the American Mathematical Monthly (published by the Mathematical Association of America, and now available online at maa.org) features an article by Tevian Dray: "Using Embedding Diagrams to Visualize Curvature". Abstract: We give an elementary treatment of the curvature of surfaces of revolution in the language of vector calculus, using differentials rather than an explicit parameterization. We illustrate some basic features of curvature using embedding diagrams, and then use such a diagram to analyze the geometry of the Schwarzschild black hole.
Prof. Malgorzata Peszynska has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for "outstanding contributions to multidisciplinary mathematical and computational modeling of flow and transport in porous media". More details to follow in a feature story. Congratulations Malgo!
Congratulations to Azhar Alhammali (Oregon State Mathematics PhD 2019 alumna) who received the prestigious title of a Fellow for Advance HE https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/fellowship . The Fellowship demonstrates a personal and institutional commitment to professionalism in learning and teaching in higher education. Across four categories, from Associate to Principal, Fellowship provides individuals with recognition of their practice, impact and leadership of teaching and learning. Dr Alhammali is currently an assistant professor at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in Saudi Arabia.
New feature articles have been created by the newsletter/media committee and are now published on the Math Website. These are New Graduate Students 2020-2021 The mathematics department welcomes new graduate students for 2020-2021. Math alumna models COVID-19 Carrie Manore’s disease modeling at national lab aiding public health initiatives to combat COVID-19 Mary Beisiegel awarded new NSF grants Mary Beisiegel awarded funding for training of mathematics GTAs and algebra education at community colleges Computational Mathematics grant awarded to Bokil and Gibson Mathematicians awarded funding for computational modeling of plasmas and novel nanocomposites. New Faculty Hires 2020-2021 The mathematics department welcomes new faculty in 2020-2021. --Media Committee (Gibson & Wing)
Math graduate students Lisa Bigler and Choah Shin have been accepted, with full funding, to the the Broader Engagement Program for the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) conference. This program will take place March 1-5, 2021. More information can be found at http://shinstitute.org/siam-cse21-broader-engagement-program/ .
Mathematics graduate student, Choah Shin, was awarded the Oregon Lottery Graduate Scholarship for the 2020-2021 academic year. You can find more information about this award at https://gradschool.oregonstate.edu/awards/oregon-lottery-scholarship .
Sarah Hagen has just published "Active Learning and the Transformation of a Graduate Student Instructor" in the AMS Blog on Teaching and Learning Mathematics at https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/ . The article is about her own transformation from lecturer to facilitator of student active learning in the classroom, and her insights about it, in the context of teaching the OSU Math boot camp for incoming graduate students.
The Daily Barometer featured our Virtual MSLC and some of the mathematics faculty involved in its running in a recent article. Read the article here.
Patrick Flynn (BS Mathematics & Physics ’18), a Ph.D. student of applied mathematics at Brown University and Gregory Mirek Brandt (BS Mathematics & Physics ’18), a Ph.D. student of astrophysics at the University of California Santa Barbara are awarded 2020 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Read about them in this IMPACT article.