|
|
Greetings from the Department Head
I am very pleased to share with you, through this newsletter, some of the exciting developments in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics over the past year.
Let me begin by expressing a very sincere gratitude to our faculty, staff, and administration for their support in adjusting to the new way of academic life forced on us by COVID-19.
Despite the pandemic, our research funding achieved record highs, our graduates secured impressive positions, and the department still found ways to celebrate this year’s graduating students.
All in all, AY 2019-20 was a highly satisfying year, and I invite you to read all about it below. Though this year will continue to look quite different than years past, I look forward to continued excellence by our faculty and students.
Sincerely,
| |
Sat Gupta
Fellow of the American Statistical Association
| |
Instruction transitions onlineAt the beginning of March, as COVID-19 made its way to the U.S., departments across campus had to start rerouting their courses. University instructors were given the week of March 9-13 to transition their courses to an online format. The department rallied together to make this drastic, but necessary, change.
We must extend a huge thank you to faculty members Dan Yasaki, Tracey Howell, Beth Lewis, and Matt Jester, for leading workshops and partnering individually with instructors to navigate new structures and platforms. They made the transition to online learning look seamless. We extend our gratitude to these individuals and all members of the department for making many sacrifices in a short window to accommodate students in these trying times.
Department celebrates 2020 graduates—virtuallyWe held a virtual celebration of our graduates on May 8, 2020 via Zoom. During the 2019-20 academic year,
- 18 students earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics,
- Eight students received the M.A. in Mathematics.
- Five students graduated with Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics.
We opened with remarks from our Department Head Sat Gupta and our Dean of College of Arts and Sciences, John Kiss. Special thanks to Ph.D. graduate Nalin Fonseka and B.S. graduate Kristen Scheckelhoff for offering words of encouragement and inspiration for future math/stats students at UNCG.
Graduates find success after UNCGOur Ph.D. program in Computational Mathematics continued to grow stronger with 26 active Ph.D. students and nine MA students in spring 2020. Five of the Ph.D. students graduated this year, and all five secured jobs even before graduation:
- Three accepted tenure-track assistant professor positions at various universities.
- One accepted a postdoc position at Duke University.
- One accepted a senior analyst position at a biomedical devices company.
The newly approved Master of Science in Applied Statistics degree will lead to more success stories about our future graduates.
REU program growsThe Department ran a virtual version of the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program on Complex Data Analysis using Statistical and Machine Learning Tools from May 26 – July 31.
Nine nationally recruited undergraduate students, shown above, were divided into five research teams and completed impressive research projects. This program is supported by a three-year NSF grant ($324,000). Sat Gupta serves as the PI for this program, Xiaoli Gao serves as the Co-PI, and Yu-Min Chung, Scott Richter, John Stufken and Jianping Sun serve as Senior Personnel.
Below, students and faculty participate in the virtual REU program.
| |
Statistical Consulting Center continues supportOur Statistical Consulting Center, under the leadership of Director and Professor Scott Richter, continued to serve the campus and the off-campus community holding over 60 consulting sessions and hosting our 5th consecutive year of Quantitative Methodology Series workshops.
| |
Research funding achieves record highAcademic year 2019-20 was the best year for the department in terms of new external funding. Pictured above, several faculty received major national awards, including:
- Dr. Yu-Min Chung received a three-year award of $158,060 from the Army Research Office.
- Dr. Talia Fernos received a one-year award of $46,793 and a three-year award of $283,145, both from NSF.
- Dr. Sat Gupta received a three-year award of $324,000 from NSF.
- Dr. Ratnasingham Shivaji received a three-year award of $238,982 from NSF.
In addition to the unprecedented success in securing external funding, faculty published 32 high-quality journal articles in calendar year 2019 and gave 92 research presentations, including 30 at international venues. The department also received a gift of $52,000 from Dr. Carol Adams Erickson for the new Adams, Culbreth, Nunn Endowed Scholarship for undergraduates.
| |
"Math Pathways" wins Student Success Pitch ContestOur Math Pathways work is going strong this year! Tracey Howell, Sat Gupta, and Dan Yasaki attended the winter meeting of the American Association of State College and Universities in New Orleans in February. Associate Vice Provost for Student Success and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Andrew Hamilton, Assistant Vice Provost for Student Success Strategy and Innovation Samantha Raynor, and Assistant Director of Frontier Set Initiatives Denisha Bland competed on the UNCG team as part of the Frontier Set Project. They won the “Student Success Pitch Contest” when they described their ideas to create the new Calculus Readiness Diagnostic Test and redesign the Precalculus/Calculus classes.
| |
World-renowned statistician joins the departmentWorld renowned statistician Dr. John Stufken joined the department in Fall 2019 as the Bank of America Excellence Professor and Director of the MS in Informatics and Analytics program. John is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was the Charles Wexler Professor of Statistics at Arizona State University before joining us.
We also made a new faculty hire this spring. Dr. Thomas Weighill will join us as Assistant Professor of Mathematics effective January 1, 2021. Thomas is currently a postdoc at Tufts and works in the area of computational topology.
| |
Research Spotlight: Dr. John Stufken
John Stufken is the Bank of America Excellence Professor in UNCG’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. To learn more about him, visit his website.
Dr. John Stufken is a world-renowned expert in statistical design and analysis of experiments. He joined UNCG in 2019 as Bank of America Excellence Professor and Director of the new MS in Informatics and Analytics program. Before joining UNCG, he was the Charles Wexler Endowed Professor of Statistics at Arizona State University (2014-2019), the Head of the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia (2003-2014), and Program Director for Statistics at the National Science Foundation (2000-2003).
Stufken’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation through six (6) 3-year NSF Research Grants, including one that was transferred when he moved to UNCG. He was also co-investigator for a four-year NSF Research Training Grant for a data-oriented training program for students in applied mathematics and statistics. He has published regularly in top statistics journals, such as the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Annals of Statistics.
He has published with multiple famous co-authors, including at least three (the living legend C.R. Rao, statistician Joachim Kunert, and mathematician Neil Sloane) who have an Erdős number of 2. Stufken is co-author of the 1999 advanced research book titled “Orthogonal Arrays: Theory and Applications,” which has about 2,000 citations. He is also co-editor of the 2015 book “Handbook of Design and Analysis of Experiments,” which, in 25 chapters written by the world’s foremost experts, covers a diverse selection of research topics in design and analysis of experiments.
Topics of Stufken’s research and areas of application are diverse. They range from crossover designs and designs for event-related fMRI studies (both with medical applications) to optimal design of experiments for multiple settings and to orthogonal arrays and other fractional factorial designs (with applications in quality control and the manufacturing industry). His latest research topics are on subdata selection for big data analysis, designs for event-related fMRI studies, and supersaturated experimental designs.
Stufken has been recognized for his research excellence throughout his career. Besides the already mentioned appointments to special professorships, as an assistant professor in 1988, he was the recipient of the M.G. Michael Award for Excellence in Research from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, University of Georgia. In 2000 and 2001 he was honored by his peers as Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association, respectively, in large part based on his research accomplishments. In 2011 he became one of the few statisticians to be named a Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK.
Stufken has also served three-year terms as main editor for two highly respected statistics journals, namely the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference (2004-2006) and The American Statistician (2009-2011), which is one of the journals of the American Statistical Association. He has also served as Associate Editor for many journals, including currently for the Journal of the American Statistical Association (2003-2005, 2011-present), Statistica Sinica (since 2014), and Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice (since 2006).
| |
Faculty present far and wide Faculty were invited to give many international presentations this year. You can see where their research has taken them, shown in yellow on the map above.
The countries where faculty presented include Taiwan, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Hungary, India, Canada, France, Spain, China, the UK, Germany, Czech Republic, and more!
| |
Research Spotlight: Dr. Ratnasingham Shivaji
Dr. Ratnasingham Shivaji serves as the Helen Barton Excellence Professor of Mathematics. To learn more about him, visit his website.
Dr. Ratnasingham Shivaji joined UNCG in 2011 after a long tenure as the W. L. Giles Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the Mississippi State University. Over the years, he has established an outstanding research program in the area of steady state (that is, elliptic) nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations and systems, involving the Laplacian and p-Laplacian operators with various linear and nonlinear boundary conditions.
He is a leading international authority on “positone” problems, where the reaction term is positive and monotone, and their generalizations, namely, semipositone problems, and problems leading to S-shaped bifurcation curves. Dr. Shivaji’s recent research passions extend to the challenging area of mathematical ecology, namely, diffusive models in population dynamics dealing with density dependent dispersal across the boundary, and effects of exterior matrix hostility. Such models involve nonlinear boundary conditions, which are always complex and difficult to study.
Despite the complexity of the subject matter, Shivaji and his team have produced elegant results. The quality of Dr. Shivaji’s research program has been recognized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) several times. To date, the NSF has awarded him (as Pl) four major three-year research grants, two of which were awarded since he joined UNCG in 2011. He also received a Simon’s Foundation research grant, and (as Co-Pl) two NSF REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduate Research) grants (spanning five years).
His ongoing NSF collaborative grant with researchers at Louisiana State University and Auburn University at Montgomery studies Mathematical and Experimental Analysis of Competitive Ecological Models: Patches, Landscapes, Stage Structure and Conditional Dispersal on the Boundary. Dr. Shivaji is also an outstanding teacher and research mentor. He has advised 15 PhDs (with 2 more in progress), 15 MA/MS graduates, and 30 undergraduate research students.
In 2019, Dr. Shivaji was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society for his research contributions, mentoring and leadership. This year, he was recognized for his outstanding teaching contributions through the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Southeastern Section Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.
| |
Thank you to our donorsThanks to our donors, we were able to provide a variety of scholarships to our students in AY 2019-20. These include the Helen Barton Scholarship, Vicky Langley Math Scholarship, Ione Holt Grogan Scholarship, Judith J. Mendenhall Scholarship, Mary D. Murray Scholarship in Mathematics, Eldon E. And Christine J. Posey Mathematics Scholarship, Cornelia Strong Scholarship, Dr. Theresa Phillips Vaughan Math Scholarship, and Bertha Barnwell Vielhauer Endowed Scholarship.
| |
|
|
Gifts of any size help enrich our department's student research, travel, conference participation, and research supplies.
| |
|
|
|
|
