MATHFEST 2015 Anderson Award Winners
Gabrielle Van Scoy, Youngstown State University (Dr. Alicia Prieto Langarica and Dr. Marnie Saunders)
Gabbie grew up in Northeast Ohio and is currently a junior at Youngstown State University pursuing degrees in Applied Mathematics and Biology. She enjoys participating in endurance sports, particularly long distance running and the equestrian sport of three-day eventing, which has made her very interested in sports conditioning and the amazing ways in which the bodies of humans and horses adapt and function. Math has also been Gabbie’s favorite subject in school for as long as she can remember. Being able to combine both math and biology under advisors Dr. Alicia Prieto Langarica of the Mathematics & Statistics department at YSU and Dr. Marnie Saunders of the Biomedical Engineering department at the University of Akron to model bone cell formation was the perfect opportunity for a first research project. Upon graduating from YSU, Gabbie hopes to go on to either graduate school in Mathematics or medical school.
Paul Diaz, Colorado School of Mines (Dr. Stephen Pankavich)
Paul was born in El Paso, Texas but moved to Denver when he was seven. He graduated from Colorado School of Mines with a Bachelor's degree in Computational Applied Mathematics & Statistics in Spring of 2015. Part the coursework during his final semester as an undergrad included working with a small group of students under the guidance of Dr. Stephen Pankavich on modeling the spread of Ebola Virus Disease in Western Africa. They were able to construct a modified SEIR model and by utilizing data from the World Health Organization, their analysis allowed them to indicate which of the countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone was most in need of resource allocation at the time. This was his second undergraduate research project he was a part of, in the past, he worked with Greedy Sampling for high-dimensional scientific computing problems under adviser Dr. Mahadevan Ganesh. Paul has spent a semester abroad in the Budapest semesters in mathematics program during the Spring of 2014. Currently, he is working on his Master's degree in Computational and Applied Mathematics. The focus of his research is in the area of Active Subspaces and Sensitivity Analysis under his adviser Dr. Paul Constantine. He is hoping to finish this in one year and will be applying to Applied Mathematics Ph. D. programs during Fall 2015.
Eric Jones, Colorado School of Mines (Dr. Stephen Pankavich)
After growing up in Fort Collins, Colorado, Eric stayed in state to attend the Colorado School of Mines (and to climb more mountains), where he graduated in 2015 with degrees in Applied Mathematics and Engineering Physics. While enrolled at Mines he enjoyed a variety of research experiences, and especially cherished meeting new collaborators; during this time Eric dabbled in cryptography, mathematical HIV models, and quantum many-body physics. As a capstone to his undergraduate mathematics curriculum, Eric and a team of three others participated on a PIC Math project which strove to slow the spread of Ebola in Western Africa through placement of a treatment center. After modifying a SEIR model to suit the traits of Ebola, the team created a variety of metrics to quantify what an "optimal treatment center location" really meant in the mathematical model, and applied our analysis to the recent outbreak. This project demonstrated to Eric the importance of working on projects with a clear and directly applicable motivation that can help people, and he hopes to work on similar projects as he pursues a doctorate in Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a specialty in Biophysics.
