News Archive

2017 Team 6 Publishes Work in AJUR
March 08, 2018
Led by efforts of James Della-Guistina, 2017 Team 6 was successful in publishing their REU Site work from summer 2017 in the general undergraduate journal American Journal on Undergraduate Research.

2017 Team 3 Publishes Paper in AIMS Biophysics
January 31, 2018
2017 Team 3 consisting of Zachary Mekus, Jessica Cooley, Aaron George, and Victoria Sabo followed their REU Site work from summer 2017 with a journal paper in AIMS Biophysics.

Maddie Rainey Presents at NCUWM
January 26-28, 2018
Maddie Rainey of the 2017 Team 2 gave an oral presentation at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics (NCUWM) about the work of her team in summer 2017. It was a 20 minute talk followed by questions at this conference hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

William Dula at the JMM
January 10-13, 2018
William Dula traveled to the Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in San Diego and presented the work of the 2017 Team 1.

2016 Team 6 Paper Published by SIURO
December 13, 2017
2016 Team 6 had their paper published by SIAM Undergraduate Research Online (SIURO), the undergraduate research journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). SIAM is recognized as the world’s premier professional society for applied and computational mathematics. Thanks to Ishmail Jabbie for following through with submission and revisions! Full citation is Ishmail A. Jabbie, George Owen, and Benjamin Whiteley, Performance Comparison of Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing, SIAM Undergraduate Research Online (SIURO), vol. 10, 2017,
Link to PDF at SIURO.

2017 Team 4 Presents at 2017 NiMBioS
November 11-12, 2017
Ryan Schumm and Elise Falgout presented Team 4’s work at the 9th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics, hosted by the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis <NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN.

2017 Team 5 Paper Published in Spora
November 25, 2017
Team 5 had a follow-up paper on its technical report accepted and published in Spora: A Journal of Biomathematics. The paper focused on the contrasting effect of two values of the coupling strength on the interaction of electrical and calcium systems can impact the cardiomyocyte’s levels of contraction.

2017 Participant Maddie Rainey Presents Poster at MiGHtY Conference
October 6-7, 2017
Maddie Rainey presented the work of 2017 Team 2 in a poster at the MiGHtY Conference at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI. The conference has a focus on graph theory, but also accepts posters of any type of mathematics for undergraduates to present.

2017 Participant William Dula Presents at MATHFest XXVII
September 29 – October 1, 2017
William Dula presented the work of 2017 Team 1 at the MATHFest XXVII organized by the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) at Medgar Evers College. A spectalar feature of this conference is that Dula’s talk was video taped and is available on YouTube!

2017 Program at SURF
August 09, 2017
The highlight of the final Week 8 of the REU Site program is the Summer Undergraduate Research Fest, sponsored by the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. Among the over 100 posters with a dominance of biological and chemical focus, our six teams represented mathematics and statistics well. Additionally, William Dula and Ari Goldbloom-Helzner from Team 1 gave one of only five oral presentations to open the event.

2017 REU Site Program Starts with Welcome Meeting
June 18, 2017
The 2017 REU Site program got underway on Sunday before Week 1 with the welcome meeting, at which all participants meet each other and their team mates. This year, we have 25 participants in a total of six teams. They are mentored by four faculty and six graduate assistants.

 

2017 Regional Undergraduate Math Research Conference
April 8, 207
At the 2017 Regional Undergraduate Math Research Conference, we were very excited to be represented in two ways: PI Dr. Gobbert gave one of the two invited keynote lectures on undergraduate research, using the 2016 Teams 5 and 6 work as examples, and Benjamin Smith presented 2016 Team 2’s work in an oral talk.

Re-union at SIAM CSE 2017 in Atlanta
February 27 – March 4, 2017
The SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering 2017 in Atlanta provided an exciting opportunity for a re-union of some participants from 2016. We organized a minisymposterium of four posters. 2016 Teams 5 and 6 were represented by Uchenna Osia and George Owen, respectively. Additionally, RA Jonathan Graf presented a poster on cutting-edge work on the Intel Xeon Phi KNL that built on Team 6’s work, and Dr. Gobbert presented on Ph.D. work by RA Xuan Huang from 2015. Also at the meeting was 2014 participant Jordi Wolfson-Pou with a poster on his ongoing Ph.D. work at Georgia Tech. It is so exciting to see what work he has done after ‘graduating’ from our program!
CSE17_UcheGeorge CSE17_wJordi
Team 4, 2016 work presented at  Joint Mathematics  Meetings
January 4-7, 2017
Abigail Kramer and Samantha Clapp presented the work of 2016 Team 4 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2017 in Atlanta, GA.
Team42016_JMM17_Clapp Kramer

Two Presentations at SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education
September 30 – October 02, 2016
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics held its inaugural SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education in Philadelphia. PI Gobbert organized a minisymposium entitled “Experience of REU Site Directors in Applied Mathematics” which provided a platform for four program directors to share their insight into running and funding REU Sites. For the first time ever, a graduate assistant presented his own perspective on being an RA in the REU Site, when Jon Graf gave his talk “Graduate Student Mentorship for Diverse Teams of Undergraduate Researchers in an REU Site”.

2016 Participant William Wang Presents at NIMBioS
October 8-9, 2016
William Wang presented the work of 2016 Team 4 at the Eighth Annual Undergraduate Research Conference at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics, held at NIMBioS in Knoxville TN.

2016 Participant Samantha Clapp Presents at B.E.E.R.
October 14-16, 2016
Samantha Clapp presented the work of 2016 Team 4 at the International Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research (the B.E.E.R. Conference) in Charleston, SC.

2016 Participant Ishmail Jabbie Presents at CUR REU Symposium
October 25, 2016
Ishmail Jabbie presented the poster of 2016 Team 6 at the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) REU Symposium in Arlington, VA. This event is held at the National Science Foundation’s headquarters and attended by their program directors. Each NSF-funded REU Site in the nation, across all NSF divisions, can nominate only one research project from the immediately preceeding summer. Approximately 135 posters were selected from 200 nominations. The photo includes PI Gobbert, who attended the faculty sessions at the meeting.

2016 Team 3 Publishes Conference Paper
July 30 – August 4, 2016
The work of 2016 Team 3 on spatio-temporal analysis of precipitation data of the Missouri river basin has been published in the JSM Proceedings from the Joint Statistical Meeting 2016 in Chicago. The article also covers parallel computing and is entitled “Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Precipitation Data via a Sufficient Dimension Reduction in Parallel”.

UMBC Publishes Homepage Article about REU Site Programs
September 1, 2016
Shortly after the Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF), UMBC published a homepage article on REU Site programs on campus in 2016. This included our program prominently with photos from SURF and interviews with participants. We were very pleased to get this on-campus exposure. The article can be found in UMBC’s News Archive.

Participant Jack Slettebak Publishes and Presents at UMBC
April 27, 2016
Local 2014 participant Jack Slettebak publishes follow-up work entitled “Pushing the Limits of the Maya Cluster with the HPCG Benchmark” in the 2016 issue of the UMBC Review: Journal of Undergraduate Research. This journal is issued to the public at the annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD), where Jack also gave an oral presentation.

Two Oral Presentations and Seven Posters at SURF
August 10, 2016
The posters from the seven teams of our REU Site were part of the 80+ posters presented by over 100 participants of the 2016 Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF). Among the only six oral presentations were two from our program: Abigail Kramer and William Wang presented Team 4’s work on the modeling of pancreatic beta-cells in cooperation with Dr. Arthur Sherman from NIH, and all members of Team 2, Ethan Crasto, Sydney Kahmann, Paula Rodriguez, and Benjamin Smith, demonstrated their GUI for predicting rain fall in the Missouri River Basin in collaboration with Dr. Amita Mehta from JCET.

Several Participants Attend SIAM Annual Meeting 2016
July 11-15, 2016
The SIAM Annual Meeting 2016 in Boston, MA, was a chance to re-unite with some participants. 2010 participant Sidafa Conde and 2012 participant Jordan Angel presented their work from graduate school, and this year’s 2016 participant Mathew Prindle attended for the professional development and networking opportunities with people from graduate students, professors, and people from industry. In particular, he attended a career fair with companies like Mathworks, Wolfram, and national laboratories to show their support and express the opportunities at their locations.
SIAMann16_JordanAngel Prindle

2016 Program Starts with Welcome Meeting
June 19, 2016
The 2016 REU Site program got underway with the traditional Welcome Meeting with dinner on Sunday. This is where the participants get to meet the faculty, graduate assistants, and their team mates.

CIRC Consultants of the Year 2016
May 6, 2016
Congratulations to Jonathan Graf and Qing Ji for being honored as CIRC consultants of the year for 2016! The Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Consulting (CIRC) is a key partner with the REU site and provides mathematical and statistical consulting to the UMBC community and beyond.
Pictured from left to right: Rouben Rostamian, Chairman Department of Mathematics &amp; Statistics, Qing Ji, Jonathan Graf, and Nagaraj Neerchal, CIRC Director.
CIRC2016consultantoftheyear

Participant Jack Slettebak Publishes and Presents at UMBC
April 27, 2016
Local 2014 participant Jack Slettebak publishes follow-up work entitled “Pushing the Limits of the Maya Cluster with the HPCG Benchmark” in the 2016 issue of the UMBC Review: Journal of Undergraduate Research. This journal is issued to the public at the annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD), where Jack also gave an oral presentation.

Participant Amanda Alexander Gives Conference Presentation
January 29-31, 2016
2015 participant Amanda Alexander presents at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Amanda Alexander Presents at 2016 JMM
January 6-9, 2016
2015 participant Amanda Alexander presents at the Joint Mathematical Meetings (JMM) in Seattle, WA.

Jennifer Houser Presents at NiMBioS
November 21-22, 2015
2015 Team 4 participant Jennifer Houser presents at the NiMBioS conference in Knoxville, TN.

Participant Eric Frazier Presents at Colloquium
October 29, 2015
2015 participant Eric Frazier presents in the Mathematics and Computer Science Colloquium at La Salle University.

Two 2015 Teams’ Research Presented at BEER Conference
October 9-11, 2015
Jessica Wojtkiewicz and Erin DeNardo of 2015 Teams 4 and 5, respectively, presents at the International Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education (BEER) at Illinois State University.

Two Oral Presentations at 2015 SURF
August 05, 2015
Our program was selected for two oral presentations at the 2015 Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF). There are only five oral presentation, and it is a great success for 2015 Teams 1 and 7 to be selected. All 8 teams presented their posters among the over 100 posters at SURF.

Field trip to Data Science Day at the Nielsen Corporation
June 25, 2015
The Nielsen Corporation, located in nearby Columbia, MD, is the national leader in tracking TV watching patterns. The company held a Data Science Day to showcase careers in data science in their company. Twenty participants of the HPC REU took the opportunity to learn more about this field that is experiencing explosive growth and poses extremely demanding statistical challenges.

2015 Program Starts with New Record of 33 Participants
June 14, 2015
The 2015 program got underway with the traditional Sunday welcome meeting. Thanks to extended funding by the NSF, the NSA, and the DOD, this year’s program has 33 participants, a new record!

SIURO Paper by 2014 Team 5 Published
June 09, 2015
2014 Team 5 consisting of Oluwapelumi Adenikinju, Julian Gilyard, Joshua Massey, Thomas Stitt
has their article “Concurrent Solutions to Linear Systems using Hybrid CPU/GPU Nodes” published in SIAM Undergraduate Research Online (SIURO).

2014 Team 3 Research Paper at HPC 2015
April 15, 2015
2014 Team 3 published the paper “Throughput Studies on an InfiniBand Interconnect
via All-to-All Communications” in the conference proceedings of the 23rd High Performance Computing Symposium (HPC 2015) in Alexandria, VA. The RA Xuan Huang gave the oral presentation at the conference.

2014 Teams 4 and 5 Present Projects at CSE15
March 14-18, 2015
The projects of 2014 Teams 4 and 5 were presented in the minisymposium “Parallel Computing for Partial Differential Equations on CPUs, GPUs, and Intel Phi” at the 2015 SIAM Meeting on Computational Science & Engineering (CSE15) in Salt Lake City. Team 4 was represented by Jack Slettebak and Jordi Wolfson-Pou, and Team 5 by Tom Stitt and Julian Gilyard.

2014 Team 3 Paper Accepted for UMBC Review
November 15, 2014
The 2014 participants Kendall Queen, Annie Dai, David Palensky, Alex Piatski, and Gina Vockeroth just had their team’s work accepted as paper in UMBC Review: Journal of Undergraduate Research. It will appear in April 2015 when it is released at the Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day.

Journal Paper by 2013 Team 4 Published
September 30, 2014
The 2013 Team 4 published the paper “Dynamics of Computational Islet Simulations: Islets with Majority Mutated Open KATP Channels Retain Bursting” in the new journal Letters in Biomathematics. The paper was originally accepted for the Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on BEER 2013 and invited to the inaugural issue of this new journal.

2014 Program Ends with Two Oral Presentations at SURF
August 06, 2014
The 2014 program ends with poster presentations from each team at the Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF). We were thrilled that several of the clients could make it. Among only five oral presentations, two came from our program. The conference was attended by 119 students and featured 56 posters in two sessions. For more accomplishments of the 2014 program, see the links to Projects, Detailed Schedule, Special Events, and Photo Album under its tab.

Intel Xeon Phi Training Event Hosted
July 15, 2014
UMBC hosted the Baltimore, MD session of the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor Developer Training Series. This all day event brought software developers from the Baltimore region to UMBC to learn the foundation needed for modernizing their code to take full advantage of Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

2013 Participant Jesse Smith Featured in Chronicle of Higher Education
July 15, 2014
2013 Participant Jesse Smith is featured in the Say Something column of the Chronicle of Higher Education. He talks about the impact of undergraduate research and the Meyerhoff Scholars Program on his future. This column is an audio series, for which he was interviewed while at an intership in Iowa. The Chronicle appears weekly in both print and online and is arguably the journal of record for Higher Education in North America. In this capacity, it reaches faculty, administrators, and staff at most institutions who will hear about UMBC in this way.

2014 Program Starts with New Record of 22 Participants
June 15, 2014
The 2014 program kicked off at today’s welcome meeting with new records all around, from 22 research participants (selected from a new record of 170+ applicants), five graduate assistants, and four faculty mentors. The participants include eight NSA Scholars from the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, a new record number in our continued partnership with this nationally acclaimed program at UMBC. The graduate assistants are funded partially by the Vice President for Research and by the Meyerhoff Program, for which we are very grateful.

2012 Participant Chris Rackauckas Awarded Two Graduate Fellowships
April 15, 2014
2012 Participant Chris Rackauckas updated us that he was successful not in one, but in fact in two applications for graduate fellowships: He was awarded both the prestigious NSF Fellowship and the Ford Fellowship. The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) marked its 60th anniversary in 2012 and funded more than 46,500 graduate students over the years. It is the only NSF program that students can directly apply for, both while still an undergraduate in their final year and while a beginning graduate student. The support includes a $32,000 annual stipend and $12,000 tuition allowance for three years of graduate studies at an institution of the student’s choice.

2013 Participants Julian Sass and Jesse Smith Present at ABRCMS 2013
November 13-16, 2013
Julian Sass and Jesse Smith present the research of 2013 Teams 1 and 2, respectively, at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) in Nashville, Tennessee. With their posters, they also represent the Meyerhoff Program and UMBC at this meeting with approximately 3,300 participants.

2013 Program Finishes with SURF Presentations
August 07, 2013
All four teams presented their posters at the CNMS Annual Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF) hosted by the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). Team 4 additionally gave one of only six oral presentations. Several of the clients were able to attend, and all participants and guests had lunch at the Skylight Room. See the Special Events page for photos and more details.

Field Trip to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
July 26, 2013
All participants and graduate students in the program traveled to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. It was an exciting opportunity to hear talks by an undergraduate student, graduate student, and post-doctoral researcher meet with very senior research staff. Team 4 additionally gave a detailed project update to its client from the NIH and discussed the remaining work. We thank Dr. Arthur Sherman for graciously organizing our visit.

2013 Program Starts with 16 Participants in 4 Teams
June 16, 2013
After move-in during the day, we welcomed all participants to UMBC on Sunday afternoon. The 2013 program has a new high of 16 participants, including 4 funded through the UMBC Meyerhoff Program. The participants met their team mates, with whom they will conduct all work in the program. Three participants, who had arrived early, took the chance to attend a special workshop on the parallel extension pbdR of the package R that was taught by HPCF RA Andrew Raim in the morning. See the HPCF webpage for the resulting report HPCF-2013-2.

2012 Team 2 Paper Published in SIURO
April 18, 2013
Team 2’s paper entitled “Assessment of Statistical Methods for Water Quality Monitoring in Maryland’s Tidal Waterways” was just published in SIAM Undergraduate Research Online (SIURO). We congratulate the authors Rosemary K. Le, Christopher V. Rackauckas, Anne S. Ross, and Nehemias Ulloa on this achievement!

HPCF Cluster tara #15 on Green Graph 500 List
April 02, 2013
The cluster tara in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility has placed #15 on the (unofficial) Green Graph 500 List. This list ranks systems on the Graph 500 list by the efficiency of their energy consumption. In Summer 2012, a team of undergraduate students in the REU Site placed tara on the Graph 500 list, from which the ranking in the Green Graph 500 list is derived.

2011 Participant Koushiki Bose Awarded NSF Fellowship
March 30, 2013
Koushiki Bose, Brown University, was just awarded an NSF Fellowship for the project “Pattern Formation in Nature: Analysis and Prediction of Pattern Selection in Stochastic Reaction-diffusion Systems”. This prestigious fellowship provides full support for three years of graduate education at any institution in the U.S. Using this full support for her graduate studies, Koushiki will go to the Operations Research and Financial Engineering Department at Princeton University.

2011 Undergraduate Assistant Matthew Brewster Presents at Towson University
March 30, 2013
Matthew Brewster, who served as undergraduate assistant for the REU site in the 2011 REU Site program, presented his work at the Undergraduate Mathematics Research Conference at Towson University. He discussed his work on characterizing the behavior of calcium waves in heart cells using high performance computing.

2012 Participants Jordan Angel and Rosemary Le Present at CSE 2013
March 01, 2013
Two participants from the 2012 program presented their teams’ work in full-length talks in the minisymposium Undergraduate Research in Computational Science and Engineering at the 2013 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, organized by SIAM VP for Education Peter R. Turner. Jordan Angel spoke on Team 1’s topic “Graph 500 Performance on a Distributed-Memory Cluster”, and Rosemary Le presented Team 2’s work on “Water Quality Monitoring of Maryland’s Tidal Waterways”.

Client Dr. Brian Smith Presents Team 2’s Poster a Second Time
October 12, 2012
2012 client Dr. Brian Smith from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources presented the team’s poster at the Maryland Water Monitoring Council’s Annual Conference. “The poster was very well received and a lot of people expressed interest in using the GUI for their work,” he reported to us. We are very excited that the team’s work is being appreciated!

HPCF Cluster tara Places 98th in November 2012 Graph 500 List
November 13, 2012

2012 Team 1 in the Summer 2012 HPC REU Site took on the research project to implement and run the Graph 500 benchmark to assess the performance of the HPCF cluster tara. This benchmark measures performance in accessing memory, as opposed to CPU performance which is emphasized in more traditional benchmarks for HPC. The submission was accepted, and tara ranked 98th on the November 2012 list. For details, see the technical report HPCF-2012-11 in our publications.The ranking was announced at the Supercomputing 2012 conference in Salt Lake City. Pictured are (left to right) the client David Mountain, mentor Dr. Matthias Gobbert, and students Jordan Angel, Nathan Wardrip, and Amy Flores, holding the official certificate for the ranking. Not able to join them at the conference were client Richard Murphy and student Justine Heritage. We acknowledge funding support for the student travel from the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation. graph500-sc12

2012 Participant Annie Ross Presents Poster at RMCWiC

November 02, 2012
2012 Participant Annie Ross has a poster presentation at the Rocky Mountain Celebration of Women in Computing (RMCWiC) in Ft. Collins, CO. The poster focuses on the graphical user interface (GUI) that the team produced in their project and how the GUI aids in the visualization of large data.

2012 Participant Jenny Louthan Gives Talk in Her Department
October 17, 2012
2012 participant Jenny Louthan presents the work of Team 3 on a university as dynamical system in a colloquium at her Department of Mathematical Sciences at Lewis & Clark College.

Client Dr. Brian Smith Presents Team 2’s Poster
October 12, 2012
2012 client Dr. Brian Smith from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources presented his team’s poster at the Atlantic Estuarine Research Society’s Fall Meeting. He reported to us after the meeting that “other monitoring agencies from the mid-Atlantic express interest in using” the tool developed by the team for their data. This is extremely exciting news of the real impact of our work on monitoring the Chesapeake Bay!

2012 participant Chris Rackauckas Presents at SUMS
September 29, 2012
Chris Rackauckas was able to travel to the Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics (SUMS) Conference at James Madison University to present his team’s poster on monitoring water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. The poster won the award for best Statistics poster!

2012 Participant Justine Heritage Gives Talk in Her Department
September 25, 2012
2012 participant Justine Heritage presents the work of her team on the Graph 500 benchmark at her home department, the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dickinson College, in the Math/CS chat lecture series.

2012 Participant Chris Rackauckas Gives Talk at Oberlin
September 13, 2012
2012 participant Chris Rackauckas presents the work of his team on statistical methods for monitoring water quality in the Chesapeake Bay to his home department at Oberlin College.

Two Teams Present Orally at SURF
August 08, 2012
All three 2012 teams present their results at the Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF). We are excited that two of the clients, Dr. Michael Dillon and Dr. Brian Smith, are able to join us. Out of only six oral presentations at SURF, two of our teams are especially included, each given two participants the opportunity of the experience of an oral presentation in front of a packed room.

2011 RA April Albertine Awarded NSF Fellowship
July 26, 2012
April Albertine, UMBC graduate student in the Ph.D. program in Statistics and graduate RA in the 2011 REU Site program, was awarded an NSF Fellowship for the project “A Bayesian Approach to Modeling Publication Bias in Meta-Analysis” with advisor Dr. Bimal Sinha. She is continuing her graduate studies in our department.

2012 Program Starts with Welcome Meeting
June 17, 2012
The 2012 program starts with the traditional welcome meeting on the Sunday preceeding the formal start. This year includes 12 participants funded by the NSF and NSA, plus 5 students taking Math 447 as summer course. This year, we welcome the 2010 participant Terry Lebair as graduate assistant and peer mentor.

2011 Participant Randal McKissack Presents at Towson University
March 31, 2012
Randal McKissack Presents Team 4’s research at the Undergraduate Mathematics Research Conference at Towson. He also graciously agreed to represent our REU Site program in a session where students share information on their research experience with other attendees.

2011 Participant Anita Thomas Presents at Infinite Possibilities Conference
March 30-31, 2012
Anita Thomas (Illinois Institute of Technology) returned to UMBC to present her team’s research at the Infinite Possibilities Conference 2012, an annual series of conferences promoting underrepresented women in the mathematical sciences.

Two Former Participants Present at Brown University
March 10, 2012
2011 Participant Koushiki Bose and 2010 Participant Sidafa Conde were both invited to give oral presentations at the Brown University Symposium for Undergraduates in Mathematical Sciences, an annual symposium for students and faculty in the northeast area. Koushiki Bose (Brown) presents the research of Team 2 in 2011, while Sidafa Conde (U. Mass Dartmouth) reports on ongoing work with his research mentor at his institution.

2011 Participant Anita Thomas Presents at CAURS
March 03, 2012
Anita Thomas (Illinois Institute of Technology) presented Team 2’s research in a poster session of the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium (CAURS), “one of the largest annual undergraduate research conferences in the country”!

Support for 12 Participants in 2012, 2013, and 2014 from NSF and NSA
February 06, 2012
We have just received preliminary notification that the program notification be able to support 12 participants each year in 2012, 2013, and 2014, to be funded jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Security Agency (NSA). To accomodate this relative late notice on funding, we will continue to consider all applications that come in, also past the stated deadline.

2011 Participant Neil Obetz Presents at the EPaDel Sectional Meeting of the MAA
November 19, 2011
Neil Obetz presents Team 1’s research in a poster session at the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held at Bryn Mawr College on November 19, 2011. The webpage of the conference is here.

2011 Participants Randal Mckissack and Richard Adjogah Present at James Edward West Symposium
October 8-9, 2011
Randal Mckissack and Richard Adjogah presented Team 4’s research in a poster session at the James Edward West Symposium, held October 8-9, 2011 at Johns Hopkins University. The symposium celebrates his work with the CRFP (Cooperative Research Fellowship Program) at Bell Labs and also his 80th birthday. More details on the conference are here. Richard and Randal also gave a talk on the work in a meeting between UMBC administrators and NSA representatives on October 5, 2011. One has to appreciate how mature and calm they presented in front of two univeristy VPs and four department chairs, among others!

2011 Participant Anita Thomas Presents in Undergraduate Mathematics Symposium
October 1, 2011
Anita Thomas presented the work of Team 2 in an oral presentation of the Undergraduate Mathematics Symposium at the University of Illinois at Chicago on Saturday, October 1, 2011. All details of the event are here.

Dr. Nagaraj Neerchal Appointed Entrepreneurship Fellow
September 01, 2011
Dr. Nagaraj Neerchal was appointed Entrepreneurship Fellow for 2012 by the Alex Brown Center for Entrepreneurship, along with Dr. Amy Froide (History) and Dr. George Karabatis (IS). Entrepreneurship Fellows raise the profile of entrepreneurship on campus, for which Dr. Neerchal is a clear prototype with his engagement in CIRC.

Summer 2011 concludes with presentations at SURF
August 10, 2011
The four REU Site teams present their work on research posters at the Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF) sponsored by the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). Several clients managed to make it to campus for the day to see this exciting even with over 90 posters in person. Additionally, Samantha Allen and Neil Obetz represented our program with one of only six oral presentations.

Client presentations start with peer mentor
June 23, 29, and 30, 2011
Seven clients from a wide variety of backgrounds and organizations presented projects for work by one of the REU teams. The Special Events page lists the names and titles. In fact, the presentations started with peer mentor Michael Curtis speaking on his project from 2010 and recommendations to the participants on project selection.

Program start with 13 participants
June 19, 2011
The Summer 2011 program started with 13 participants. We leveraged the NSF-funding for 8 participants to make the experience available to 3 students from UMBC’s Meyerhoff Program funded by the NSA and 2 additional participants. The program is supported by 4 graduate students as TAs and RAs and Dr. Kofi Adragni as additional faculty mentor. We also have for the first time undergraduate help, Matthew Brewster for the webpage and Michael Curtis returning from 2010 as peer mentor.

Movie on 2010 program released
April 08, 2011
A short movie about the inaugural 2010 REU Site program is now available at YouTube at the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO38SdaPNdQ. It includes opening remarks by UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski, III and testimonials from participants Terry Lebair and Michael Curtis. We are grateful to DoIT New Media studio for putting this together for us.

Summer 2011 participants selected
March 28, 2011
The selection process for choosing the 8 NSF-funded participants for Summer 2011 was completed and the students accepted our offers. The REU staff is looking forward to another productive summer of collaborative research involving high performance computing.

2010 participant Christopher Raastad presents at conference
March 2, 2011
Christopher Raastad presented Team 2‘s REU research Computational Islet Simulations of Pancreatic Beta Cells at a minisymposium at the 2011 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering in Reno, NV. Details on the minisymposium are available here. Also Sidafa Conde came to the conference to support Chris. At this conference, Dr. Gobbert also organized minisymposium MS137 Training Students in Skills for CS&E. The talks from this minisymposium are available here.

2010 participant Sidafa Conde presents at conference
January 9, 2011
Sidafa Conde presented a poster of Team 2‘s REU research Enabling physiologically representative simulations of pancreatic beta cells at the 2011 Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, LA. The poster can be viewed here.

2010 participant Michael Curtis presents at conference
October 23, 2010
Michael Curtis presented a poster of Team 1‘s REU research Collaborative filtering in recommender systems at the Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics (SUMS) Conference at James Madison University. More information is available at the SUMS webpage.

2010 participant Teresa Lebair featured on college webpage
August 18, 2010
2010 participant Teresa Lebair and her participation in our REU Site are showcased on the webpage of her school, St. Vincent College. The article with photo of her team can be found here.

Summer 2010 program concludes
August 11, 2010
Summer 2010 program concludes with well-received poster presentations at the Summer Undergraduate Research Fest (SURF), a campus-wide poster session. One of the REU Site teams, represented by Teresa Lebair and Christopher Raastad, additionally gave an oral presentation on their project, as one of only four oral presentations in the plenary session of SURF. We were happy that two of the clients could attend the research fest and receive their project results in person.

Dr. Nagaraj K. Neerchal Elected Fellow of the ASA
August 03, 2010
Dr. Nagaraj K. Neerchal, co-director of CIRC and the REU Site, was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). This honor recognizes the professional contributions of members of the ASA and is limited to one-third of one percent of the ASA membership. The photo shows him receiving the honor in a ceremony held during the Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver.
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Summer 2010 REU Begins
June 20, 2010
The 2010 REU Site at UMBC has begun. The participants arrived on Saturday June 20, 2010 and were greeted with a welcome dinner with the staff. The program for the summer was discussed in detail, and a police officer spoke about campus safety.

Dr. Matthias Gobbert Wins University System Award for Mentoring
April 16, 2010
Dr. Matthias Gobbert is the recipient of the 2010 University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring, in recognition of his success in using the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Consulting, the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility, and other initiatives in leading many graduate students to their first publications. Dr. Gobbert was honored at the UMBC Faculty and Staff Awards Ceremony on April 07, and the award was formally given as part of the Board of Regents meeting on April 16. The photo shows (from left to right) Board of Regents Chair Clifford M. Kendall, UMBC Provost Elliot Hirshman, Dr. Gobbert, and University System Chancellor William Brit Kirwan at the Regents meeting.
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Summer 2010 Participants Selected
April 05, 2010
The selection process for choosing the 8 NSF-funded participants for Summer 2010 was completed and the students accepted our offers. Unfortunately, there were many highly qualified candidates who we could not select. For students who will be still eligible next year (must be still undergraduate student during Fall 2011), we encourage you to apply again.

Over 100 Applications Received
February 26, 2010
We are very happy to report that we received over 100 applications for the 8 NSF-funded participant positions in the REU Site program! Unfortunately, there will be many highly qualified candidates who we cannot select. For students who will be still eligible next year (must be still undergraduate student during Fall 2011), we encourage you to apply again.

Application deadline: February 19, 2010
January 15, 2010
For full consideration, please ensure that we have receive all application material including letters of recommendation by February 19, 2010. Please make sure to fill out the online application form at the application page since it collects relevant data and allows us to be sure that we receive the letters of recommendation. Thank you for your cooperation.

New REU Site Webpage
November 19, 2009
The REU Site releases its redesigned webpage at hpcreu.umbc.edu. The page will feature all program details, a detailed schedule, information about the people involved, and more. The information will be assembled over the next month and then updated continuously until and throughout the program.

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