Our Ph.D. Alumnae

In summer 2012 Melinda participated in the Research Experiences for Graduate Students (REGS) program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where she investigated completely integrable systems and cluster algebras. She plans on participating in another REGS project in summer 2013. Melinda is in her first year at UIUC, where she is taking courses in algebra, complex analysis, and analytic number theory. She is a Teaching Assistant for Calculus II; duties include leading a biweekly recitation section as well as grading worksheets, quizzes, and exams. Still completely undecided on what area of math she wants to pursue, Melinda attends a weekly first year seminar dedicated to introducing students to a variety of research areas. However, analytic number theory has sparked her interest and she has also been attending a weekly seminar in related topics. In October she is attending the Midwest Number Theory Conference for Graduate Students and Recent PhDs.

Cornelia is taking courses in analysis and topology her first year. She is also taking a course on teaching in the fall and possibly a topics course for the spring. She is TAing for integral calculus, which involves leading three discussion sections twice a week but no grading!

Amanda started her Ph.D. in the fall of 2011, and is taking graduate courses in algebra, topology and real analysis during her first year. She is the TA for Math 3B, which is the second quarter of calculus for students in science, math and engineering, and she is also working in the tutoring lab. Outside the classroom she attends a weekly seminar for first year students in which professors present their recent work. Amanda has submitted an abstract to present at the upcoming Joint Meetings in Boston on her work with Prof. Diesel and Jane Rieck from the summer of 2011.

Sue has two discussion sessions of Calculus 1. She is taking Algebra, Real Analysis, and Topology.

Caitlin has finished the majority of her coursework and is preparing for preliminary exams. Recently she began working with Lenny Ng on low dimensional topology and knot theory.  Caitlin is also teaching her own Calculus II course, and she is enjoying working with a talented and motivated group of students.  At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, she will be a graduate representative for Duke to the Nebraska Conference for Women in Math.

Voula is currently fighting with the math software Sage, trying to obtain pictures of crystal graphs with more than 50 vertices. During the next few months, she plans to attend some conferences on Schubert varieties. She hopes to be able to graduate in 2 years. And she bought a car!

This year Bianca will be taking Algebraic Geometry and Topology as well as attending a seminar on arithmetic dynamics taught by her advisor, Michelle Manes. She will be taking the algebra comprehensive in October. In addition, she is a part of Super-M this year which is the NSF GK-12 fellowship at UH. She will be going to Big Island to work with elementary school students and seeing what mathematics adapt well to elementary math classes.

Katie Kinnaird is working in applied mathematics under the supervision of her advisor Scott Pauls. Her research currently focuses on using mathematics like Spectral Clustering and other Numerical Linear Algebra techniques to extract features from music, specifically music by the Beatles. Her work relies heavily on programming in MatLab. Katie has been teaching an introductory calculus class this fall term and has been learning how to find and maintain a good balance between research and teaching. Recently Katie is the recipient of the 2010-11 Graduate Community Service Award at Dartmouth, whose purpose it is to "outstanding community service undertaken by a graduate student on behalf of the entire Arts and Sciences graduate community." Katie plans to donate 25 percent of the award money to STEP UP OLPC, an organization that donates laptops to primary schools Sao Tome and Principe.

Beth passed her qualifying exams and recently received the D.J. White Teaching Excellence award.

Jen has been studying singular Schubert varities under the supervision of Eric Sommers, and she plans on graduating in 2013. In the summer of 2012 she will be presenting a poster on her research at a Schubert calculus workshop in Osaka Japan.

Aviva Halani is working on on-line chain partitioning of orders. Kierstead actually wrote the first paper on the subject in the early 80s when he was a graduate student, and at the time, apparently, his professors were trying to prove that there was no bound for the value of the on-line chain partitioning for any width. Not much progress has been made in tightening the bound of general orders since then, though much has been done for interval orders, semi-orders, 2-dimensional orders, and up-growing version of each of these.

Karin is starting her second year at Roanoke College, where she teaches a wide variety of courses, from Calculus to Discrete Math to Mathematical Reasoning. Last semester she developed a new course for non-math majors, How to Run the World Efficiently, that focuses on the basics of graph theory and their applications. She will be teaching Geometry this semester. She is a Project NExT fellow for the 2010-2011 years and was asked to serve as a co-advisor for the Roanoke College MAA student chapter. She has an article coming out soon in Discrete Applied Mathematics that discusses the First-Fit coloring of bounded tolerance graphs, and she is working on finalizing another article for submission.

Megan's area of interest is Graph Theory and heradvisor is Karen Collins. She passed my three written qualifying exams and will give her oral qualifying exam sometime this year, hopefully in the fall semester. Last Spring she taught Math 118 Introductory Calculus II: Integration and Its Applications, and this Fall she will be teaching Math 117 Introductory Calculus. Also last year, she took courses in Homology and Cohomology Theory, Homotopy Theory, Number Theory, and Quadratic Forms, as well as individual tutorials in Graph Theory.

Hester Graves completed her Ph.D. thesis in 2009 entitled On Euclidean Ideal Classes. In it she uses large sieve techniques to study Euclidean ideal classes. A copy of her dissertation is available here.

Sonja successfully defended her dissertation in July 2013, and in 2013-2014 she will teaching full-time at the Santa Barbara City College math department. Her thesis is "A type B version of Thompson's group F," and her Ph.D. advisor Dr. Jon McCammond. Congratulations to Sonja!