Mathematicians of EvenQuads Deck 2

Ilka Agricola (b. 1973)

Ilka Agricola is featured for her contributions to mathematics in research mathematics and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

Born in 1973 in the Netherlands, Agricola graduated from Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany with an master’s degree in theoretical physics in 1996. She was a visiting researcher at Rutgers University (1997) and went on to earn a PhD in mathematics from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2000), specializing in harmonic analysis and differential geometry. After completing her PhD, she was a visiting researcher at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (2001) and at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (2002).  Agricola’s main research topics are spin geometry and Dirac operators, holonomy theory of connections with torsion, Riemannian manifolds with non-integrable geometries, and geometry of homogeneous spaces.

At Humboldt University (2003–2008), Agricola led a Volkswagen Foundation-funded research group in mathematical physics. She was a project manager for a string theory program at the German Research Foundation and the Collaborative Research Center 1080 (2004–2008). In 2008 Agricola was appointed full professor at the University of Marburg, where from November 2014 until October 2018 she was Dean of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. She is also the Director of the Collection of Mathematical Models at the university (2008–present). The historical Collection of plaster and cardboard mathematical models was revived in 2008 by Agricola’s persistent efforts to restore the old models, acquire new ones, and support their pedagogical use. Through workshops and the Mathematical Model Seminar, Agricola has formed a community of faculty and students who use the Collection’s models as inspiration for cross-disciplinary discussions, teaching materials, and mathematical presentations. 

She has co-authored four books in global analysis and mathematical physics and has over 30 other publications; Agricola has mentored 8 PhD students and supervised more than 40 bachelor or master theses as well. Agricola is also the project leader of Math4VIP, a program aimed at increasing accessibility for mathematics students with visual impairments funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (joint with KIT, Karlsruhe) (2023).

Agricola is Editor-in-Chief of the journals Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry (since 2015) and Mathematische Semesterberichte (since 2021). She received the Honorary Medal of Charles University in Prague (2003). In 2016, she was awarded the Ars Legendi Preis Mathematik (national prize for excellence in teaching mathematics) by the German Mathematical Society (DMV). She was also president of the DMV (2021–2022). Agricola was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2022) and is currently Chair of the Committee on Electronic Information and Communication, International Mathematical Union (2023–2026).

References

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-v1gc92cDOZnJYs6f5YR8TK4bRQv3ckc/view
https://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~agricola/
http://www.ams.org/cgi-bin/fellows/fellows_by_year.cgi
https://www.springer.com/journal/10455
https://www.springer.com/journal/591
https://cm.osu.cz/EditorialBoard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilka_Agricola
https://www.mathematik.de/presse/2802-neue-dmv-pr%C3%A4sidentin-ilka-agricola-nimmt-amtsgesch%C3%A4fte-auf?highlight=WyJpbGthIl0= (German, Dr Agricola president of DMV)
https://www.stifterverband.org/veranstaltungen/2016_04_05_ars_legendi_mathematik (German, Dr Agricola receives Ars legendi price)
https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=89246
https://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~agricola/material/model-collection.pdf

Julia Maria Aguirre (b. 1966)

Julia Maria Aguirre is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Julia Maria Aguirre earned her BA in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, her MA in Education from the University of Chicago in 1993, and her PhD in Education from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. She is Professor of Education and Faculty Director of the Teacher Certification Programs at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

Aguirre’s research focuses on equity studies in mathematics education, culturally responsive mathematics pedagogy, and the roles race, class, culture, language, and gender play in mathematics teaching and learning. Her goal is to prepare a new generation of caring, anti-racist, decolonizing and inclusive educators that make learning mathematics more meaningful, humanizing and just. Her work with committed mathematics teachers who positively impact their students’ learning by reimagining their pedagogy empowers her to expand access and advancement in K–12 mathematics education, dismantle the racist practice of tracking, engage families and communities as partners in improving math education, and advocate for a mathematics education that leads to social justice, civic participation, and a diverse STEM workforce.

Dr. Aguirre has been a PI and co-PI on many National Science Foundation funded projects including: The Center for Mathematics Education of Latinos/as (CEMELA, Co-PI); Teachers Empowered to Advance CHange in Mathematics” (TEACH Math, Co-PI); Mathematical Modeling with Cultural and Community Contexts (M2C3, PI); Advancing Equity and Strengthening Teaching with Elementary Mathematical Modeling (EQ-STEMM, PI). A through line of these projects are research and professional learning commitments to develop conceptual and practical tools to support K-12 mathematics teachers to effectively teach culturally and linguistically diverse students by connecting mathematics to cultural and community funds of knowledge, everyday experiences, eliciting student mathematical thinking and ideas, analyzing power and participation in math learning spaces, and supporting students to be change-agents for community well-being.

In addition to many articles and book chapters, Aguirre is the co-author of the highly cited 2013 book The Impact of Identity in K–8 mathematics: Rethinking equity-based practices. She is also co-editor of the 2019 book Transforming mathematics teacher education: An equity-based approach.

References

Julia Aguirre, Ph.D., University of Washington Tacoma, 2022 https://directory.tacoma.uw.edu/employee/jaguirre

MSU Mathematics Education Colloquium, MSU Mathematics Education Colloquium, 15 March 2017 https://prime.natsci.msu.edu/sites/_prime/assets/File/AguirreFlyer.pdf

Julia Maria Aguirre. Julia Maria Aguirre, Ph.D., 28 August 2021 https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/dr-julia-aguirre/home

Drake, C., Aguirre, J. M., Bartell, T. G., Foote, M. Q., Roth McDuffie, A., & Turner, E. E. TeachMath Learning Modules for K–8 Mathematics Methods Courses, Teachers Empowered to Advance Change in Mathematics Project, 2015 https://teachmath.info/about/people

Nancy Wick. NSF awards $3.5 million to prepare math teachers for diverse classrooms, University of Washington, 8 December 2010 https://www.washington.edu/news/2016/10/25/new-nsf-initiative-to-bring-real-world-mathematics-to-elementary-educatio

James Urton. New NSF initiative to bring ‘real-world’ mathematics to elementary education, University of Washington, 25 October  2016 https://www.washington.edu/news/2010/12/08/nsf-awards-3-5-million-to-prepare-math-teachers-for-diverse-classrooms 

NSF Award Abstract #1228034: TEACH MATH award https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1228034 

Deborah Loewenberg Ball (b. 1950s)

Deborah Loewenberg Ball is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball was an elementary school math teacher who went back to school to get her PhD in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy from Michigan State University (1988). She is now the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor (2005) and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor (2000) of education, a Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research, and the Founding Director of TeachingWorks, all at the University of Michigan.

Ball’s prolific work includes more than 150 co-authored publications related to the practice of teaching, teacher preparation, and “leveraging the power of teaching to disrupt racism, marginalization, and inequity.” Her research has been supported by more than 30 grants, mainly from the National Science Foundation. In 2011, Ball founded TeachingWorks, an institute aiming to develop a skillful and diverse teaching force while addressing issues of social justice. She disseminates this work across US, Chile, Norway, Israel, and India.

Ball has served on the Presidential National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2006–08), was appointed to the National Science Board (2013–18) by President Obama, and again in 2023 by President Biden, and served as the president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) (2017–18). She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (2003–present).

Her honors include the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) Louise Hay Award for Outstanding Contributions to Mathematics Education (2009), the Edward Pomeroy Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education from American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (2014), and the Felix Klein Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics Education Research from the International Mathematics Union (2017). Ball was elected a member of both the National Academy of Education (2007) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014), and is a Fellow of both the American Mathematical Society (2013) and the AERA (2013).

References

Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball webpage at University of Michigan: https://deborahloewenbergball.com/

American Academy of Arts & Sciences: https://www.amacad.org/person/deborah-loewenberg-ball

American Educational Research Association 2013 Fellows: https://www.aera.net/About-AERA/Awards/AERA-Fellows/2013-AERA-Fellows#Ball20

List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/cgi-bin/fellows/fellows.cgi

National Academy of Education: https://naeducation.org/our-members/deborah-loewenberg-ball/

Felix Klein Award, International Commission on Mathematical Instruction: https://www.mathunion.org/icmi/awards/felix-klein-award/2017-felix-klein-award

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Award: https://aacte.org/2014/02/aacte-to-honor-deborah-loewenberg-ball-with-award-for-outstanding-contributions-to-teacher-education/

Louise Hay Award, Association for Women in Mathematics: https://awm-math.org/awards/hay-award/hay-award-2009/

TeachingWorks: https://www.teachingworks.org/about

Selenne Bañuelos (b. 1985)

Selenne Bañuelos is featured for her contributions to establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Selenne Bañuelos earned her BS in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara (2007) and her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2013. She is currently an associate professor at California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI), where she has been teaching since 2014. She began a two-year term as associate director at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) in 2021.

Bañuelos’s research is in the fields of differential and difference equations, dynamical systems, and their applications to mathematical biology. Specifically, she has examined the effects of thermoregulation on sleep and the mathematical epidemiology of the Zika virus.

Bañuelos has demonstrated commitment to cultivating mathematical communities and promoting participation of underrepresented groups throughout her academic journey, even during her time in graduate school at USC where she was involved in forming their first SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science) chapter. Bañuelos was on the leadership team of Project PROMESAS, a five-year, $6 million Hispanic-Serving Institution-STEM grant to CSUCI funded by the U.S. Department of Education. She was both an organizer or participant in the IPAM Latinx in the Mathematical Sciences Conferences in 2015, 2018, and 2022. During her time at CSUCI, she has co-advised their SACNAS chapter, been a mentor for the national Math Alliance, and been a mentor and advisor through the CSU Alliance PUMP (Preparing Undergraduates through Mentoring towards PhDs) program.

Her various fellowships and awards include a 2014 Linton-Poodry SACNAS Leadership Fellowship and a 2020 MAA Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College or University Mathematics Faculty Member.

References

Henry J. Alder Awards: Selenne Bañuelos. July 2020, MAA Awards and Prizes July 2020. https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/Awards/Alder_2020_Banuelos.pdf (Accessed 7/19/22)

IPAM Welcomes Selenne Bañuelos as Associate Director. May 19, 2021, IPAM News. http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/news/ipam-welcomes-selenne-banuelos-as-associate-director/ (Accessed 7/18/22)

Testimonios: Dr. Selenne Bañuelos. November 15, 2021, AMS blogs: inclusion/exclusion. https://blogs.ams.org/inclusionexclusion/2021/11/15/testimonios-dr-selenne-banuelos/ (Accessed 7/19/22)

Selenne Bañuelos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenne_Ba%C3%B1uelos (Accessed 7/18/22)

https://web.archive.org/web/20210725102931/https://ciapps.csuci.edu/FacultyBiographies/selenne.banuelos

Margaret Bayer (b. 1955)

Margaret Bayer is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan (1977), Margaret Bayer earned an MS (1981) and PhD (1983) in mathematics at Cornell University. She taught at Northeastern University for four years and then joined the faculty at the University of Kansas (KU) in 1988, achieving the rank of professor in 2001.

Bayer’s research focuses on polyhedral combinatorics, especially face vectors and flag vectors of convex polytopes and Eulerian posets. She has over twenty-five publications in refereed journals and has received more than 10 institutional and National Science Foundation research grants. Bayer has made several extended, funded research visits, especially to the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, California.

In addition to two doctoral students, Bayer has supervised 14 masters students and served on at least 15 other doctoral committees. She co-organized a workshop for women at MSRI in 2017. Bayer received recognition for her teaching from the KU Commission on the Status of Women (1998), the KU Center for Teaching Excellence (2002) and the KU Department of Mathematics (2014). Bayer has also amassed an extensive record of professional service at KU, including as her department’s associate chair and director of undergraduate studies from 2009 to 2017, and more than 30 years of membership on the Women’s Studies Advisory Board. In 1998–1999, Bayer was a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer. She has long been the Book Reviews Editor for the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) Newsletter, for which work the AWM recognized Bayer in 2013 with its Service Award. In 2020 she was named an AWM Fellow and also elected to the KU Women’s Hall of Fame.

References

KU College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Department of Mathematics. Margaret Bayer to be Inducted into 2020 Women’s Hall of Fame. 20 May 2020. https://math.ku.edu/margaret-bayer-be-inducted-2020-womens-hall-fame (accessed 9 August 2022).

Margaret Bayer. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Bayer (accessed 9 August 2022).

Margaret Bayer’s Home Page. University of Kansas. Last updated 14 June 2022. https://bayer.ku.edu (accessed 9 August 2022).

Margaret M. Bayer. Mathematics Genealogy Project. https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=44369 (accessed 9 August 2022).

Mary Lucy Cartwright (1900–1998)

Mary Lucy Cartwright is featured for her contributions to research mathematics.

Mary Lucy Cartwright earned her DPhil in mathematics in 1930 from Oxford University. Cartwright made important contributions to the theory of functions and differential equations. She published over 90 papers on classical analysis, differential equations, and related topological problems. Cartwright is well known for her work with J. E. Littlewood on developing topological techniques to prove existence theorems and for her work with E. F. Collingwood on cluster sets. Her collaborations with Littlewood in response to a government request to analyze radar laid the foundation for chaos theory.

Cartwright was director of studies in mathematics at Girton College (Cambridge) from 1936–1949. During this time she was commandant of Girton’s Red Cross detachment (1940–1944). Cartwright became Mistress of Girton in 1949, which came with heavy administrative duties, but she still managed to graduate 5 DPhil students in the next decade and maintain a reputation as a supportive advisor. She was promoted to Reader in the Theory of Functions in 1959, and was President of the London Mathematical Society (1961–1963). After her retirement from Girton in 1968, Cartwright held various visiting professorships at universities in the UK, the USA, and Poland.

Cartwright was the first woman to achieve a first class at Oxford (1923) and the first woman mathematician to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1947; the second was elected more than 40 years later). She was the first woman to receive the Sylvester Medal (Royal Society of London, 1964) and the De Morgan Medal (London Mathematical Society, 1968). In 1969, Cartwright was elevated to Dame Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She died in Cambridge on April 3, 1998.

References

McMurran, Shawnee and Tattersall. Mary Cartwright (1900-1998). February 1999 Notices of the AMS, Vol. 46, No. 2.
https://www.ams.org/notices/199902/mem-cartwright.pdf

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/cartwright-mary-lucy

https://www.historyofdatascience.com/mary-lucy-cartwright-the-inspired-mathematician-behind-chaos-theory/

Awards:
https://www.lms.ac.uk/prizes/list-lms-prize-winners
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dsunM9ukGLgaW3HdG9cvJ_QKd7pWjGI0qi_fCb1ROD4/pubhtml?gid=1174285939&single=true
https://catalogues.royalsociety.org/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Persons&id=NA7957&pos=4
Royal Society of Edinburgh P.168 (A-Z) https://rse.org.uk/fellowship/past-fellows/

 Ruth Charney (b. 1950)

 Ruth Charney is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Ruth Charney graduated from Brandeis University in 1972, and then studied modern dance in New York City for one year. She earned her PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1977, then took a two-year postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley. She was at Yale University from 1979 to 1984, first as an NSF postdoc and then as an assistant professor. Charney spent eighteen years on the mathematics faculty at the Ohio State University before returning to her undergraduate alma mater in 2003. She is currently a professor of mathematics at Brandeis and the President of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) 2021–2023.

Charney is a pioneer in the field of geometric group theory, the study of groups through the connections between their algebraic properties and the topological and geometric properties of spaces on which these groups act. Her work focuses on the geometry of metric spaces of non-positive curvature and groups acting as symmetries on these spaces. She has also made key contributions to the theory of Artin groups. To date, she has published over 50 peer-reviewed research papers on these topics.

She has organized and participated in numerous panels, events, and workshops for supporting early-career mathematicians, particularly women. Many of her professional activities are aimed at encouraging and mentoring women in mathematics and she received NSF funding to support AWM research symposia with that purpose.

Charney served as Vice President of the AMS (2006–2009), and was on the Boards of Trustees of both the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (2007–2015) and the AMS (2012–2016). She was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) 2013–2015 and held a Pólya Lectureship from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) during this same period. Charney is a Fellow of both the AMS (2013) and AWM (2017).

References

Ruth Charney, AMS President, American Mathematical Society. http://www.ams.org/about-us/presidents/66-charney

Ruth Charney, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. https://www.msri.org/people/5498

Ruth Charney, Brandeis University. https://people.brandeis.edu/~charney/

L. Suhay, “Calculating women: How to get more girls into math”, Christian Science Monitor, Boston, 2014. https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2014/0314/Calculating-women-How-to-get-more-girls-into-math

 Young Ju Choie (b. 1959)

 Young Ju Choie is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

Young Ju Choie was born in Seoul, South Korea. She completed her BS in Mathematics at Ewha Womens University (Korea, 1982), and her PhD in mathematics at Temple University (1986). Currently, Choie is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea. A POSTECH University professor is one of the highest honor positions as a faculty member in the university. There are only 5 (including Choie) out of about 300 regular faculty members. She has held Visiting Scholar positions at many universities, including the University of Cambridge (1996–1997), Stanford University (2005, 2011), and the Max Planck Institute (2011, 2014, 2015).

Choie’s research focuses on number theory and modular forms. Her work has resulted in over one hundred published research articles. Choie is also a co author of two recent books: Codes and Modular forms, A Dictionary (World Scientific, 2019), and Jacobi-Like Forms, Pseudodifferential Operators, and Quasimodular Forms (Springer Verlag, 2019). She has served as the chief editor of the Bulletin of the Korean Mathematical Society and is currently an editor of the Springer Journal for Research in Number Theory.

Choie is a prodigious organizer of mathematical workshops and meetings, having organized over sixteen international workshops between 2016 and 2021 alone. She was an organizer of the 45th KAST International Symposium on Period of Automorphic forms, the 2019 Korean Mathematical Society Annual meetings, and is currently an organizer of the French-Korean International Research Laboratory number theory webinar series through l’université de Bordeaux.
Choie’s service to the profession includes several positions that support women in mathematics. She served as president of the Korean Women in the Mathematical Sciences (2017), a board member of the Korea Federation of Women’s Sciences and Technology Association (2016–2017), and as a member of the IMU Committee for Women in Mathematics (2016–2018).

For her distinguished and varied contributions to mathematics, Choie has received numerous awards. Among them are being named “The best woman scientist of the year” by the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology (2005), selection to the inaugural class of American Mathematical Society Fellows (2013), and receiving an Academic Award of Korean Mathematical Society (2018), the Kyung-Am Award by the Kung-Am Education and Culture Foundation (2021), and the Science and Technology Medal of Innovation Medal from the President of South Korea (2022).

References

 Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YoungJu_Choie

  https://yjchoie.postech.ac.kr/

 https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=22134

  https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4gSRWssAAAAJ&hl=ko

 https://peoplepill.com/people/youngju-choie

 Sandra Crespo (b. 1966)

 Sandra Crespo is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Born in the Dominican Republic, Sandra Crespo obtained her PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1998 and is a professor of mathematics education and the Associate Chair of graduate education in the department of teacher education at Michigan State University (MSU). Crespo is the first Latina to hold the rank of Professor in MSU’s Department of Teacher Education. Her research focuses on supporting mathematics educators in developing equitable and collaborative spaces and also on students’ creativity and resilience.

She is one of the authors of the book Smarter Together: Collaboration and Equity in the Elementary Mathematics Classroom and of two of the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) four-book series focused on Access and Equity (Grades 3–5 and Grades 6–8). She is also co-editor of the AMTE (Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators) book Cases for Mathematics Teacher Educators. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Lucent Technologies Foundation, and the Michigan Department of Education.

In 2019, Crespo was profiled in the Lathisms: Latinxs and Hispanics in Mathematical Sciences website. In 2020, she co-chaired the biannual TODOS Conference. TODOS: Mathematics for ALL is a non-profit organization that advocates for equity in mathematics education. She was an invited speaker for the 14th International Congress on Mathematics Education (2020, postponed to 2021). Crespo is a New Leadership Academy Leadership Fellow (2018) at the University of Michigan and an Academic Advancement Network Fellow (2017). In 2017, she was awarded the W. J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award at MSU. She has served as editor of the Mathematics Teacher Educator journal (2014–2018), as associate editor of Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (2019–2024) and has been appointed to the US Commission on Mathematics Instruction (2021–2024).

References

Personal Website: https://sites.google.com/msu.edu/dr-sandra-crespo/home%20?pli=1

Judith E Jacobs Lecture, 2022 Annual AMTE Conference, https://amte.net/content/featured-speaker-sandra-crespo

Michigan State University Biography, https://sites.google.com/msu.edu/dr-sandra-crespo/bio

Biography from the website Lathisms, https://www.lathisms.org/calendar-2019/sandra-crespo

Sandra Crespo: The Trailblazer, Michigan State University College of Education Article, May 7, 2020 https://education.msu.edu/people/Crespo-Sandra/

María Angélica Cueto (b. 1981)

María Angélica Cueto is featured for her contributions to research mathematics.

A native of Argentina, María Angélica Cueto obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. She had an NSF Postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research fellowship at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mittag-Leffler Institute. She is currently an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on tropical geometry and its interactions with combinatorics and algebraic geometry. She is particularly interested in the connection between tropical varieties and non-Archimedean analytic spaces.

Cueto has co-organized numerous national and international meetings, including PEAK 2017: Workshop on Perspectives and Emerging Topics in Algebra and Konvexity, in Austria, three minisymposia on Tropical Geometry at the SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry, the Bi-annual Algebraic and Tropical Meetings of Brown and YaLE (BATMOBYLE), a BIRS Workshop on Specialization of Linear Series for Algebraic and Tropical Curves, Effective Methods in Algebraic Geometry MEGA 2013, PEAKs 2013: Workshop on Perspectives and Emerging Topics in Algebra and Combinatorics in Austria, and a workshop on Tropical Geometry in Spain. In 2016 she participated in the Fields Institute’s Special Program on Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry.

She has received two NSF Standard Grants, as well as grants from the Collaborate@ICERM Program, the Research in Pairs (RiP) Program at the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach in Germany, the Centre Interfacultaire Bernoulli (CIB) in Switzerland, and Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques (CIRM) in France.

References

María Angélica Cueto’s Home Page. Last updated 6 July 2022. The Ohio State University. https://people.math.osu.edu/cueto.5/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

María Angélica Cueto’s CV: https://people.math.osu.edu/cueto.5/Maria_Angelica_Cueto_CV.pdf 

María Angélica Cueto. Lathisms 2017.Latinxs and Hispanics in the Mathematical Sciences. https://www.lathisms.org/calendar-2017/maria-angelica-cueto (accessed 24 August 2022).

María Angélica Cueto. Mathematics Genealogy Project. https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=149614 (accessed 24 August 2022).

Christine Mann Darden (b. 1942)

Christine Mann Darden is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Christine Mann Darden earned an MS in Applied Mathematics at Virginia State University after graduating in 1962 from Hampton College with a BS in Mathematics. In 1983 she obtained a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from George Washington University. Darden was an aerospace engineer, researcher, data analyst, and a leader at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

Darden’s 40-year career at NASA started in 1967, when she was added to the pool of “human computers” at Langley. After working as a data analyst for eight years, she asked to be transferred to the engineering division, becoming one of the first female aerospace engineers at Langley. Her first assignment as an engineer led her to a 25-year career studying sonic boom minimization. In 1989, she was appointed as the technical leader of NASA’s Sonic Boom Group, where she published over fifty research articles.

Darden became the first Black woman at NASA’s Langley Research Center to be promoted into the top rank of the federal civil service. Among the many positions she held at NASA, she was the director of the Program Management Office of the Aerospace Performing Center, and became Langley’s assistant director for strategic planning.

Darden has received many honors and awards over the years. She was featured in M.L. Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures alongside Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. In 2019, all four women were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States Congress. The Mathematical Association of America then created the Christine Darden Lecture series, in which Darden gave the inaugural lecture at MAA MathFest 2021.

References

D’Agostino, Susan. The NASA Engineer Who’s a Mathematician at Heart. Quanta Magazine, January 19, 2021. (Last accessed on July 4, 2022).
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-nasa-engineer-whos-a-mathematician-at-heart-20210119/

Lineberry, Denise. Standing on the Shoulders of a Computer. The Researcher News, NASA Langley Research Center, May 29, 2013. (Last accessed on July 4, 2022).
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_CDarden.html

Ford, D’Lyn. NASA Engineer, Leader to Give NC State Fall Commencement Speech. News, North Carolina State University, November 27, 2018. (Last accessed on July 4, 2022).
https://news.ncsu.edu/2018/11/2018-fall-commencement-speech/

Joseph, Natalie. ‘Hidden Figures’ Honored at U.S. Capitol for Congressional Gold Medal. NASA,
December 10, 2019. (Last accessed on July 4, 2022).
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/hidden-figures-honored-at-us-capitol-for-congressional-gold-medal

Alicia Dickenstein (b. 1955)

Alicia Dickenstein is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

Alicia Dickenstein was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She completed her BS in mathematics in 1977 and her PhD in 1982 at the University of Buenos Aires. Dickenstein is an Emerita professor at the University of Buenos Aires, a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina and has held visiting appointments across South America, Europe, and the United States.

Dickenstein’s research is in algebraic geometry and its applications, such as algebraic methods for the study of biochemical reaction networks. She has published over 85 research papers, supervised 7 graduate and 20 undergraduate students, and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Symbolic Computation (2003–2018) and SIAM Journal of Applied Algebra and Geometry (2016–2021). She is currently on the editorial boards of the American Mathematical Society’s Mathematics of Computation, La Matematica, the new research journal of the Association for Women in Mathematics, the Vietnam Journal of Mathematics, Algebraic Combinatorics and Orbita Mathematica, the new journal of UMALCA, the Mathematical Union of Latin America and the Caribbean. Dickenstein is the Editor-in-chief of Revista de la Unión Matemática Argentina (since 2018). Dickenstein also served as a vice-president of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) (2015–2018) and is passionate about increasing the reach of the IMU, particularly in the global south. In addition to her research, Dickenstein co-authored Matemax, a problem-solving book for children presented in both Spanish and English.

In 2015, Dickenstein won the World Academy of Sciences’s TWAS prize for outstanding contributions to the understanding of discriminants. In 2019 she was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and in 2020 she was named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). In 2021 Dickenstein received the L’Oréal-UNESCO International Award for Women in Science for the Latin America and Caribbean region.

She has served in the Council of the AMS (2015-2019) and is currently a member of the Council of SIAM since 2021. She is a Member of the National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences from 2019 and of the National Academy of Sciences of Argentina from 2020. She holds honorary doctorates from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH, Sweden), the National University of the South (UNS, Argentina) and the National University of the Littoral (UNL, Argentina).

References

Alicia Dickenstein. http://mate.dm.uba.ar/~alidick/  Last accessed 2022-07-11

Alicia Dickenstein. Math Union. https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/EC/2015-2018/CV-EC03-DICKENSTEIN-Alicia.pdf  Last accessed 2022-07-11

Mathematics of Computation. https://www.ams.org/publications/journals/journalsframework/mcomedit

La Matematica. https://www.springer.com/journal/44007/editors

Revista de la Unión Matemática Argentina. https://inmabb.criba.edu.ar/revuma/revuma.php?p=board  Last accessed 2022-07-11

SIAM Announces Class of 2020 Fellows. https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/siam-announces-class-of-2020-fellows  Last accessed 2022-07-11

Winners of 2015 TWAS Prizes announced. The World Academy of Sciences. https://twas.org/article/winners-2015-twas-prizes-announced  Last accessed 2022-07-11

2021 International Awards. Unesco. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/press_kit_-_2021_fwis_international_awards_en.pdf Last accessed 2022-07-11

2019 Class of Fellows of the AMS. The American Mathematical Society. https://www.ams.org/fellows_by_year.cgi?year=2019  Last accessed 2022-07-11

https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/media-centre/news/2021/2/dickenstein.aspx

Matemax book:  https://www.amazon.com/Matemax-English-Spanish-Alicia-Dickenstein/dp/1470455005/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1660999145&refinements=p_27%3AAlicia+Dickenstein&s=books&sr=1-3

Moon Duchin (b. late 1970s)

Moon Duchin is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; mathematics in business, industry, and government; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Moon Duchin completed BA degrees in mathematics and women’s studies from Harvard University in 1998, earned both MS and PhD (2005) degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Michigan (2008–2011) and at University of California, Davis (2005–2008). Duchin served as ​​co-president of the Harvard Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Student Association and co-founded the University of Chicago Directed Reading Program.

Duchin is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Tufts University and a founding faculty member of their interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society Program. To date, Duchin has advised four PhD students. Duchin leads the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) Redistricting lab at the Tisch College of Civic Life, whose work focuses on data science interventions for civil rights.

Duchin’s pure mathematics research in geometry informs applied work in voting theory, districting and gerrymandering. In conjunction with mathematics research, Duchin also publishes in top journals on science, technology, law, philosophy, and public policy. Additionally, Duchin was principal co-author (with Guy-Uriel Charles) of an Amicus Brief for Mathematicians, Law Professors, and Students, cited in the Supreme Court’s dissent in the case Rucho v. Common Cause. Duchin served as a Consulting Expert for then-Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf for the highly-publicized congressional redistricting process in that state (2018). Duchin also served on the AMS Committee on Human Rights of Mathematicians (2016–2019) and is currently a member of the AMS Committee on Science Policy (2020–2023).

In 2017 Duchin co-founded the NSF-funded Directed Reading Programming Network, which partners undergraduate math majors with graduate students to work on collaborative projects. Duchin serves on the board for Spectra (2015–2022), an association for LGBT mathematicians. Duchin was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2017), a Guggenheim Fellow (2018), and a Radcliffe Fellow (Evelyn Green Davis Fellowship, 2018–2019). Duchin’s work has received uninterrupted funding from the NSF from 2009–2022, including a NSF CAREER grant (2013–2018) and a 2019–2020 Convergence Accelerator (C-Accel) grant for work on census data. Duchin delivered the AMS-SIAM-MAA Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lecture at the 2018 Joint Mathematics Meetings.

References

CV: https://mggg.org/people/mduchin/docs/Duchin-CV-2022.pdf

Spectra, The Association for LGBT Mathematicians (June 20, 2022). http://www.lgbtmath.org/Board.html

https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=33220

https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/moon-duchin/

https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/moon-duchin

https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/people/faculty/moon-duchin

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-422_9ol1.pdf

https://mggg.org/amicus

Valeria Espinosa (b. 1980s)

Valeria Espinosa is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Valeria Espinosa received her BASc in applied mathematics at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in 2007 and earned a PhD in statistics from Harvard University in 2013 under the supervision of Donald Rubin and Tirthankar Dasgupta. She then worked as a statistician at Google on problems in Search Ads and Google Health. Currently, she is a staff data scientist at Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company.

Espinosa’s main areas of interest are causal inference, design and analysis of experiments, Bayesian modeling, and data visualization. Her thesis proposed a new method for analyzing experiments, which combines randomization with Bayesian and potential outcomes ideas. In fact, she designed an experiment on directed differentiation of stem cells into beta cells on which to apply her work. She has also worked on investigating the drug war in Mexico, analyzing the effect of military interventions on homicide rates. Espinosa has published papers in Technometrics, The American Statistician, and Nature Communications.

At the 2020 Joint Statistical Meetings, she served on a career panel for women in data science. Her outreach activities include mentoring a middle-school student through Spark Mentoring and volunteering around the Bay area.

Espinosa’s undergraduate thesis won the “Premio de Investigación Ex-ITAM.” She graduated with a “Mención Honorífica” from ITAM and was a recipient of the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Award. At Harvard, she earned the Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates.

References

Last date accessed to all references: July 1, 2022

“Lathisms 2021.” Lathisms, https://www.lathisms.org/calendar-2021s/valeria-espinosa. 

“Mathematics Genealogy Project.” Valeria Espinosa – The Mathematics Genealogy Project, https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=193510. 

Personal Website https://sites.google.com/site/valeriaespinosahome/. 

Valeria Espinosa – Staff Data Scientist – Waymo | Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeria-espinosa-64264930. 

Espinosa, Valeria. 2013. A Bayesian Perspective on Factorial Experiments Using Potential Outcomes. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.  https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/11745722/Espinosa_gsas.harvard_0084L_11245.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

“Alumni: Statistics PHD,” Department of Statistics, Harvard University.  https://statistics.fas.harvard.edu/alumni

“Awards and honors.” ITAM. https://www.itam.mx/en/1/pages/awards-and-honors#exitam  Valeria Espinosa received Premio de Investigation Ex-ITAM award in 2007 for undergraduate thesis.

Elizabeth Fennema (1928–2021)

Elizabeth Fennema is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Elizabeth Fennema earned a BS in psychology from Kansas State University in 1950 and a MA in education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1952. By 1957 she was raising three children when another working woman with children recruited Fennema to pursue continuing education. Fennema completed a PhD in education in 1969 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM). She went on to enjoy a thirty-four year career in the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UWM.

Fennema’s research focused on understanding gender and achievement. She and co-author Julia Sherman developed the Fennema-Sherman Mathematical Attitude Scales (1976) to help researchers quantitatively measure attitudes of female students towards mathematics. Through their research, they provided evidence that women’s underperformance in mathematics was socio-cultural in nature. Fennema brought awareness to the hidden ways the mathematics curriculum alienated young women. She joined a team developing an innovative method of teaching called cognitively guided instruction. Published as a book called Children’s Mathematics (1999), this highly cited pedagogical framework encouraged teachers to understand children’s intuitive mathematical thinking and to leverage that thinking to better help children learn mathematics. After her retirement from UWM in 1997, Fennema became a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, where she led a Spencer Foundation-funded program to improve doctoral education. 

Fennema’s research included over 60 peer-reviewed publications. Her groundbreaking work was recognized with the first annual award for Outstanding Contribution to Research on Women and Education from the American Educational Research Association in 1985. She was named a member of the National Academy of Education in 1997. Fennema was also honored with the Dora Helen Skypek Award from Women in Mathematics Education in 1986 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 2021.

References

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: https://www.nctm.org/About/President,-Board-and-Committees/Memorials/In-Memoriam_-Elizabeth-Fennema/

St Andrews’s Mac Tutor: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fennema/

University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://education.wisc.edu/news/uw-madisons-elizabeth-fennema-celebrated-for-her-research-on-gender-and-mathematics-education-dies/

Joan Ferrini-Mundy (b. 1954)

Joan Ferrini-Mundy is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy earned her PhD from the University of New Hampshire in 1980. She is currently the president of the University of Maine, having previously worked at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Michigan State University, the National Academy of Sciences, University of New Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke College. Her positions at NSF included Director of the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings, Assistant Director of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, and Chief Operating Officer.

Ferrini-Mundy’s research focuses on mathematics education and STEM education policy. She serves on multiple boards and committees, including the Maine Innovation Economy Advisory Board, the Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics Board, and the National Academy of Sciences Board on Higher Education and the Workforce. She served a 2014–2016 term on the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). Most notably, she chaired the writing group for Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, a 2000 comprehensive update from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics that set goals and recommendations for mathematics education from prekindergarten to grade twelve.

Ferrini-Mundy has received numerous grants and awards, including the Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive Award, and multiple private foundation and NSF grants. She was awarded the 2000 Louise Hay Award from AWM. Ferrini-Mundy was elected a Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2018.

References

Association for Women in Mathematics. Louise Hay Award: 2000 Winner: Joan Ferrini-Mundy.

https://awm-math.org/awards/hay-award/hay-award-2000/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

Ferrini-Mundy, Joan. Curriculum Vita. Last updated 25 May 2021. https://umaine.edu/president/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2021/06/JFM-VITA-6-15-21.pdf (accessed 24 August 2022).

Ferrini-Mundy, Joan. Principles and Standards for School Mathematics: A Guide for Mathematicians. Notices of the AMS Vol. 47, No. 8 (September 2000), 868–876. https://www.ams.org/notices/200008/comm-ferrini.pdf (accessed 24 August 2022).

Joan Ferrini-Mundy. Mathematics Genealogy Project. https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=21332 (accessed 24 August 2022).

Joan Ferrini-Mundy. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Ferrini-Mundy (accessed 24 August 2022).

Joan Ferrini-Mundy, National Science Foundation. Successful STEM Education Initiative. 2022.

https://successfulstemeducation.org/content/joan-ferrini-mundy-national-science-foundation (accessed 24 August 2022).

Irene Fonseca (b. 1956)

Irene Fonseca is featured for her contributions to research mathematics.

Irene Fonseca received a Licenciatura in mathematics from the University of Lisbon in 1980 and obtained her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1985. She spent a year as an assistant professor at the University of Lisbon and then a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées at the École Polytechnique before moving to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Rising to the rank of professor at CMU, Fonseca was honored with the Mellon College of Science endowed chair in 2003 for her contributions to both research and teaching at CMU. In 2014, she was named a University Professor. In 2018, Fonseca was installed as the first Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics, an honor that specifically reflects how her work advances understanding of human interactions with technology. Fonseca has served as director of the Center for Nonlinear Analysis (CNA) at Carnegie Mellon since 1998.

Fonseca’s research is at the interface of pure and applied analysis and is motivated by applications in the physical sciences and engineering. She has over 115 publications. Recently, her work has focused on variational techniques as they apply to contemporary problems in materials science and computer vision. In addition to her research contributions, Fonseca was elected President of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2012 and completed her full term of service in the role of past-president in 2015.

Fonseca has won numerous prestigious awards. In recognition for her contributions to research mathematics, Fonseca was bestowed a knighthood in the Military Order of St. James by the then-President of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, in 1997. Invited addresses and awards include, but are not limited to, the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture (2006), an invited International Congress of Mathematicians lecture in 2022, and the ISIMM (International Society for the Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics) senior prize in 2022. Fonseca is a fellow of SIAM (2009), the American Mathematical Society (2013), and the European Academy of Sciences (2021).

References

CV-  http://irenefonseca.weebly.com/cv.html.

Personal site: http://irenefonseca.weebly.com/

Irene Fonseca – The Mathematics Genealogy Project, https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=5604.

Irene Fonseca, Biographies of Women Mathematicians
https://mathwomen.agnesscott.org/women/fonseca.htm

https://www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-events/2022/0427_fonseca-isimm.html
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2018/february/kavcic-moura-professorships.html

Hannah Fry (b. 1984)

Hannah Fry is featured for her contributions to establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

Hannah Fry received a PhD in fluid dynamics from the Department of Mathematics at University College London (UCL) in 2011. Fry completed a postdoctoral research position at UCL that focused on the study of complex social and economic systems. In 2012, Fry was appointed as a lecturer in the Mathematics of Cities at UCL’s Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. After serving as a senior lecturer and associate professor, Fry was promoted to professor in the Mathematics of Cities in 2021.

Fry is a science presenter, public speaker, and best-selling author. She is involved with outreach, podcasting, academic stand-up, and public lectures. Her TEDx talk “The Mathematics of Love” was featured on the front page of TED.com and has attracted over 5.2 million views. Fry regularly appears on the UK’s BBC Radio.

In 2013, Fry won the UCL Provost’s Public Engager of the Year award for her broad portfolio of public engagement activities. In 2018, Fry was awarded the Christopher Zeeman Medal by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the London Mathematical Society for her contributions to the public understanding of the mathematical sciences. Fry received the 2020 Asimov Prize, a literary-scientific award from the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L’Aquila, Italy, for her book Hello World. Fry was also awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the London-based Institution of Engineering and Technology on the 150th anniversary of the institution in 2020.

References

Wikipedia, Last accessed July 10, 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry

UCL webpage, Last accessed July 10, 2022 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/casa/dr-hannah-fry

https://hannahfry.co.uk/

https://www.ft.com/content/a5e33e5a-99b9-4bbc-948f-8a527c7675c3

Nancy Geller (b. 1944)

Nancy Geller is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Nancy Geller was born in New York City and earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from City College of New York in 1965. She studied mathematics at Case Western Reserve University, earning her MS in 1967 and PhD in 1972. She held academic positions in statistics at the University of Rochester (1970–1972) and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (1972–1978) before beginning a faculty position in biostatistics at the Medical College of Pennsylvania (1978–1979). She was affiliated with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 1979 to 1990. Since 1990, she has been the Director of the Office of Biostatistics Research of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which is within the National Institutes of Health.

As a biostatistician, many of her nearly 300 publications are collaborations with medical investigators undertaking clinical trials. She has worked on treatments for and prevention of heart, lung, and blood diseases, including hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Geller has also contributed to theoretical design and analysis methods for clinical trials. She edited the collection Advances in Clinical Trial Biostatistics (CRC Press, 2003).

Geller was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 1993 and served as ASA’s president in 2011. She was President of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics in 2001. She is an associate editor for Biometrics and has served on the editorial board for Clinical Trials. In 2009, she won the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences.

References

Cochran, James. ASA Leaders Reminisce: Nancy Geller. AmStat News. 1 April 2016. https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2016/04/01/geller16/ (accessed 21 June 2022).

NHLBI’s Geller Honored for Statistical Sciences. NIH Record Vol. 61, No. 21 (16 October 2009), 15. https://nihrecord.nih.gov/sites/recordNIH/files/pdf/2009/NIH-Record-2009-10-16.pdf (accessed 21 June 2022).

Office of Biostatistics Research. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/divisions/division-intramural-research/office-biostatistics-research-0 (accessed 21 June 2022).

https://ww2.amstat.org/fellows/

Ruth Gonzalez (b. mid 1950s)

Ruth Gonzalez is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Ruth Gonzalez was born in Texas to Mexican parents. She worked 20–40 hours per week to put herself through college at the University of Texas-Austin. She earned her BA and MA in mathematics in 1975 and 1979 respectively, and was a researcher at Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas-Austin from 1976 to 1980. There, she worked on wave propagation problems in underwater acoustics that were of interest to the U.S. Navy. Gonzalez earned her PhD in applied mathematics from Rice University in 1986. She is the first US-born Hispanic* woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. Gonzalez started her career in 1980 as a geophysical mathematician and became a Senior Research Specialist for the Exxon Production Research Company. She is an expert in seismic imaging methods and developed algorithms that produce geological images used to discover oil and gas reservoirs. Gonzalez was instrumental in persuading Exxon to fund community outreach and minority-focused activities. She has been dedicated to encouraging young women and girls to pursue an education in STEM fields.

*While “Hispanic” may not be the modern descriptor used by US citizens of Mexican descent, it was the terminology found in sources related to Gonzalez. For historical consistency, we have chosen to use the term here. https://www.california-mexicocenter.org/the-difference-between-hispanic-and-mexican/ 

References

Diversity Dialogues, AMATYC posted 4/17/2021 by Marilyn Mays, https://my.amatyc.org/blogs/marilyn-mays1/2021/04/17/the-first-known-hispanic-female-mathematician-in-t

Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes College, last modified Jan 12, 2022,  https://mathwomen.agnesscott.org/women/gonzalez.htm

Hispanic Engineer and IT, Ruth Gonzalez: Looking for Oil with Math by Carmela Mellado, 1993, https://books.google.com/books?id=mX2nSJmEpIAC&lpg=PA20&ots=fXGME6zlag&dq=%22Ruth%20gonzalez%22%20phd%20thesis&pg=PA18#v=onepage&q&f=false

Ruth Gonzalez, The Mathematics of Oil Recovery, Careers that Count, 1991, 2018, Association for Women in Mathematics, https://awm-math.org/resources/careers/careers-that-count/2/

Ruth Gonzalez, Newsletter of Center for Research on Parallel Computation at Rice University, http://www.crpc.rice.edu/newsletters/win97/eac_gonzalez.html

You Can Make It: Latina Achievers Encourage High School Girls to Pursue Education, No Matter What by Elizabeth Howton, LA Times, May 19, 1991, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-05-19-me-3185-story.html

Shelly Harvey (b. 1970s)

Shelly Harvey is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Shelly Harvey earned a PhD from Rice University in 2002, then continued research in topology and geometry through NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, San Diego (2002–2003) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a C.L.E. Moore Instructor (2003–2005). Harvey is currently a professor of mathematics at Rice University working in low-dimensional topology and geometry, group theory, and non-commutative algebra.

To date, Harvey has been awarded several NSF grants to support research in low dimensional topology involving algebraic methods, noncommutative algebra, knot and link concordance, and Heegaard Floer methods. Harvey was awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2006) and the Simons Foundation (2014) and has supervised 10 PhD students and 12 postdocs.

Harvey also received a 2014–2019 NSF grant for Building Communities in the Mathematical Sciences initiatives at Rice University. Harvey has organized a number of research symposiums and special sessions for the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Harvey is currently an editor for the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society (2020–2024).

As a faculty sponsor for the AWM at Rice University, Harvey demonstrated commitment to supporting women’s success in mathematics. Harvey is also a member of the LGBTQ+ community and serves as a faculty sponsor for Rice University’s Queer Graduate Student Association. Harvey was elected a Fellow of the AMS in their inaugural class (2013).

References

Harvey, Shelley. (n.d.). Shelley Harvey. https://math.rice.edu/~shelly/ 

Shelley Harvey. (2022, February 4). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelly_Harvey  

Raegan J. Higgins (b. 1980)

Raegan J. Higgins is featured for her contributions to establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Raegan J. Higgins was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She completed a BS in mathematics in 2002 from Xavier University of Louisiana and her MS (2004) and PhD (2008) from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she was one of the first two Black women to earn a doctoral degree in mathematics. She was hired by Texas Tech University (TTU) in 2008 and became the first Black professor to earn tenure and promotion in the Mathematics & Statistics Department. In addition, Higgins is currently an Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Success.

Her main research interest is time scales, specifically oscillation criteria for certain linear and nonlinear second order dynamic equations. She also studies applications of time scales to biology, economics, and statistics. Additionally, Higgins has worked throughout her career to improve the training of pre-service teachers and to increase the participation of women and people of color in STEM. For instance, she first became involved in the EDGE (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education) Program in 2002 and has been its co-director since 2017. That same year, she co-founded the Mathematically Gifted & Black website. In 2013, she co-founded the TTU Young Women in Mathematics organization, which evolved into its AWM chapter in 2018.

The AWM recognized Higgins with its Service Award in 2020 and the Gweneth Humphreys Award in 2021. Higgins was also named a 2023 Fellow of the AWM. She has been a Principal Investigator on many NSF grants, including the Bridges Across Texas Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (2017–2020, 2021–2026). These grants mentored middle school students, offered scholarships to underrepresented students, and evaluated recruitment and retention strategies.

References

https://www.depts.ttu.edu/artsandsciences/faculty/news_features/2022/raegan_higgins_named_asst_vice_provost_faculty_success_2022.php 

Association for Women in Mathematics. Gweneth Humphreys Award: 2021 Winner: Raegan Higgins. https://awm-math.org/awards/humphreys-award/humphreys-award-2021/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

Association for Women in Mathematics. AWM Service Award 2020. https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-service-award/awm-service-award-2020/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

Black History Month 2018 Honoree: Raegan Higgins. Mathematically Gifted & Black. https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/raegan-higgins/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

The EDGE Program. EDGE Directors. https://www.edgeforwomen.org/edge-directors/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

National Science Foundation. Simple Search Results: Raegan Higgins. https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText=Raegan+Higgins (accessed 24 August 2022).

Raegan Higgins. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raegan_Higgins (accessed 24 August 2022).

Raegan Higgins, Ph.D. Texas Tech University Department of Mathematics & Statistics. Last updated 22 June 2021. https://www.depts.ttu.edu/math/raeganhiggins/index.php (accessed 24 August 2022).

Raegan J. Higgins. Mathematics Genealogy Project. https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=122842 (accessed 24 August 2022).

Harvey, Shelley. (n.d.). Shelley Harvey. https://math.rice.edu/~shelly/ 

Shelley Harvey. (2022, February 4). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelly_Harvey  

Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992)

Grace Hopper is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Grace Hopper was a mathematician, computer scientist, and a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy. She was a pioneer in developing computer technology and popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages. The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) and Cray XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) were named for her.

Hopper was born in New York City (1906). After graduating from Vassar College (1928) with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics, she earned her master’s degree (1930) and PhD in mathematics (1934) from Yale University. Hopper taught mathematics at Vassar (1931–1943) before joining the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1943 during World War II. In 1944, she was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, where she worked on Mark I, the first large-scale automatic calculator and a precursor of electronic computers.

In 1949 Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which was acquired by companies that later became part of Unisys Corporation. Hopper helped design and develop the UNIVAC I, one of the first compilers. In 1957 her division developed Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler. Hopper was part of the first meeting of the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) and instrumental in the development of a new language COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) in 1959. Hopper’s belief that programs should be written in a language that was close to English (rather than in machine code) was captured in COBOL, and it went on to be the most ubiquitous business language to date.

After retiring from the Navy Reserve in 1966 with the rank of commander, Hopper was recalled and continued to serve until 1986 when she retired as a rear admiral. At the time of her retirement, she was the oldest commissioned officer on active U.S. naval duty. Hopper was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat decoration awarded by the Department of Defense.

Hopper was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (1962) and was named the first computer science Man of the Year by the Data Processing Management Association (1969). When she was awarded the National Medal of Technology (1991), she said “If you ask me what accomplishment I’m most proud of, the answer would be all the young people I’ve trained over the years; that’s more important than writing the first compiler.” She was interred in Arlington National Cemetery following her death on New Year’s Day 1992. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of her remarkable contributions to the field of computer science.

References

Grace Murray Hopper, Naval History and Heritage Command. https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/biographies-list/bios-h/hopper-grace.html

Grace Hopper, United States naval officer and mathematician. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Grace-Hopper

Grace Hopper, History of Scientific Women. https://scientificwomen.net/women/hopper-grace-45

Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992): A legacy of innovation and service. https://news.yale.edu/2017/02/10/grace-murray-hopper-1906-1992-legacy-innovation-and-service

Ilana Seidel Horn (b. 1971)

Ilana Seidel Horn is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Ilana Horn worked as a high school mathematics teacher after graduating with a BA in mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1993. She then studied mathematics education at the University of California, Berkeley (MA 1998, PhD 2002). Currently, Horn is a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University, where she began as an associate professor in 2009. Previously, she was an assistant professor of mathematics education at the University of Washington.

Horn’s research involves the relation of mathematics teacher learning to instructional improvement, especially in urban schools. Her more than 30 articles, 16 book chapters, and three books on equitable mathematics education explore topics such as how authentic mathematics can become more widely available, especially to students from groups historically excluded from mathematics. She has been principal or co-principal investigator for a dozen grants funded by the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Awards include both the American Educational Research Association Division K Outstanding Dissertation Award and the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education Outstanding Dissertation Award (both 2003), the Outstanding Publication by the American Psychology Association, Division 15 (Educational Psychology) (2015), and the Distinguished Faculty Colleague Award at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University (2019).

References

Horn, Ilana. CV: Ilana Seidel Horn. Vanderbilt University Peabody College. https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/docs/pdf/faculty/cvs/ilana-horn.pdf (accessed 24 August 2022).

Horn, Ilana. Personal Website and Blog: Ilana Seidel Horn. http://ilanahorn.com/#bio (accessed 24 August 2022).

Ilana Horn. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilana-horn-89268a8/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

Ilana Horn: Professor, Math Education, Department of Teaching and Learning. Vanderbilt University Peabody College. https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/bio/ilana-horn (accessed 24 August 2022).

Keynote Speaker: Ilana Horn. Reinventing Mathematics Education: A Symposium for Educators. http://reinventingmath.com/?speaker=dr-ilana-horn (accessed 24 August 2022).

National Academy of Education. Other Invited Speakers and Guests Attending 2020 NAEd/Spencer Fall Fellows Retreat and Annual Meeting: Ilana Horn, Vanderbilt University. https://naeducation.org/alumni-attending-2020-annual-meeting/ (accessed 24 August 2022).

National Science Foundation. Simple Search Results: Ilana Horn. https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText=Ilana+Horn
(accessed 24 August 2022).

TERC and National Science Foundation. Teaching Amidst Uncertainty – Project TAU. 2022 STEM For All Video Showcase: Access, Inclusion, and Equity. 10–17 May 2022. https://stemforall2022.videohall.com/presentations/2427 (accessed 24 August 2022).

Pao-sheng Hsu (b. late 1930s)

Pao-sheng Hsu is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

After primary school, Pao-sheng Hsu’s education was conducted in both Chinese and English, with Chinese history and literature taught in Chinese and all other subjects taught in English. She earned her BA in mathematics from Mills College and her PhD in mathematics in 1975 from Polytechnic University in New York.

Hsu taught undergraduate mathematics for over thirty years. During this time, she worked at several institutions including Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Vassar College, and the University of Maine. She has published papers in both measure theory and mathematics education.

In 1996, Hsu was the founding chair of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) Education Committee. In 2006, Hsu co-founded the AWM Teacher Partnership Program, which pairs mathematicians in all areas of research, including mathematics education, with K–12 teachers of mathematics.

In 2013, Hsu received the AWM Service Award for her role in establishing the Teacher Partnership Program and her service work to the AWM, including serving on the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences Forum and AWM Web Task Force. She was named a member of the 2019 class of AWM Fellows for her work as a mathematics researcher and as a leader in mathematics education, particularly in building communities among various groups working on both mathematics research and the teaching of mathematics.

References

https://awm-math.org/programs/teacher-partnerships/

https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=57686

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pao-sheng_Hsu

https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-service-award/

https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2019-awm-fellows/

https://www.ams.org/about-us/governance/committees/humanright-past.html

50 Years of Women in Mathematics:Sept-Oct 2006 Newsletter, p.5, announcement of TPP https://www.drivehq.com/folder/p8755087/1751134571.aspx 

https://awm-math.org/programs/teacher-partnerships/ (current TPP)

Rhonda Hughes (b. 1947)

Rhonda Hughes, née Weisberg is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Rhonda Hughes was raised in Chicago and entered the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an undergraduate in engineering. In 1967 she began studying mathematics at University of Illinois Chicago, earning her BS, MS, and PhD by 1975. She taught at Tufts University for five years and then joined the faculty of Bryn Mawr College in 1980, where she has been the Helen Herrmann Professor Emeritus of Mathematics since 2011. Her research focuses on functional analysis, operator theory, and ill-posed problems. She has created content for Khan Academy and served as Mathematics Scholar in Residence at The Agnes Irwin School, a college preparatory school for girls near Bryn Mawr.

Hughes served as President of the Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM) for the 1987–1988 term, overseeing diversity initiatives as well as creation of the Schafer Prize and the Travel Grant. She and Sylvia Bozeman organized the Spelman-Bryn Mawr Summer Mathematics Program for female undergraduate students (1992–1994) and went on to found the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Program in 1998. In 2013 the EDGE program established a foundation, named for Hughes and Bozeman. Hughes continues to inspire and encourage women from diverse backgrounds to pursue mathematical careers.

She received the Mathematical Association of America’s Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics in 1998 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004. AWM has honored her with its first Gweneth Humphreys Award (2011), its first Presidential Recognition Award (2015), and named her to its Inaugural Class of Fellows (2018).

References

Association for Women in Mathematics. 2018 Inaugural Class of AWM Fellows. https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2018-awm-fellows/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Association for Women in Mathematics. AWM Presidential Recognition Awards. https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-presidential-award/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Association for Women in Mathematics. Gweneth Humphreys Award: 2011 Winner: Rhonda Hughes. https://awm-math.org/awards/humphreys-award/humphreys-award-2011/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Blum, Lenore. A Brief History of the Association for Women in Mathematics: The Presidents’ Perspectives. The Second Decade (1981–1991): A coming of age. Association for Women in Mathematics. https://awm-math.org/about/history/a-brief-history-of-awm/4/#TOC-rhonda-%20hughes (accessed 25 August 2022).

The EDGE Program. The EDGE Foundation. https://www.edgeforwomen.org/support-edge/the-edge-foundation/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Hughes, Rhonda. Profile. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhonda-hughes-96119122/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Hughes, Rhonda J. Faculty Page. Inside Bryn Mawr. https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/people/rhonda-j-hughes (accessed 25 August 2022).

Mathematical Association of America. Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award. https://www.maa.org/member-communities/maa-awards/teaching-awards/haimo-award-distinguished-teaching (accessed 25 August 2022).

Rhonda Hughes. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhonda_Hughes (accessed 25 August 2022).

Rhonda Jo Hughes. Mathematics Genealogy Project. https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=64692 (accessed 25 August 2022).

Deborah Hughes Hallett (b. 1944)

Deborah Hughes Hallett is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

Deborah Hughes Hallett graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in mathematics in 1966 and an MA in 1970. She also earned an MA from Harvard University (1976). In 1975, Hughes Hallett began teaching mathematics at Harvard University, holding positions as Preceptor (1975–1978), Senior Preceptor (1978–1991), and Professor of the Practice (1991–1998). She also taught at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey between 1981 and 1984. In 1998 she joined the faculty of the University of Arizona. She is now Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Hughes Hallett has dedicated her career to improving the teaching of mathematics. With Andrew Gleason, she organized the Calculus Consortium based at Harvard University in 1989. This consortium involved a wide variety of schools and reframed the calculus curriculum by placing equal emphasis on graphical, numerical, algebraic, and verbal interpretations in calculus to support conceptual understanding. Through this project she was the lead co-author on a calculus textbook that has been used at over 500 institutions and has been revised through eight editions. She is lead co-author on an applied calculus textbook and has co-authored textbooks on algebra and precalculus, and has published articles on calculus reform, undergraduate education, and quantitative literacy. In 1998, 2002, and 2006, she co-chaired the International Conference on the Teaching of Mathematics, attended by hundreds of faculty from all over the world.

Hughes Hallett is widely recognized for the excellence and impact of her teaching. She received the AWM Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education in 1998, the MAA Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2005, and the 2022 AMS Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics. She is a two-time winner (1998 and 2000) of the ICTCM Award for Excellence and Innovation Using Technology in Collegiate Mathematics. She was named a fellow of the AAAS in 1998.

References

Deborah J Hughes Hallett, Department of Mathematics, The University of Arizona. https://www.math.arizona.edu/people/dhughes1

Deborah Hughes Hallett, Faculty CV, Harvard Kennedy School. https://apps.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/cv/DeborahHughesHallett.pdf

Deborah Hughes Hallett, Faculty Profile, Harvard Kennedy School. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/deborah-hughes-hallett

Lomen, D. Lovelock, and W McCallum. Workshops on Teaching Reform Calculus, Department of Mathematics, The University of Arizona. https://www.math.arizona.edu/outreach/programs/calculus-reform-workshops

Louise Hay Award, 1998 Winner: Deborah Hughes Hallett. Association for Women in Mathematics. https://awm-math.org/awards/hay-award/hay-award-1998/

Book list:  https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/deborah-hughes-hallett/204770/

ICTCM Award, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICTCM_Award

Historic Fellows, American Association for the Advancement of Science. https://www.aaas.org/fellows/historic

Deborah Hughes Hallett receives 2022 Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics, American Mathematical Society. https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6840

http://personal.denison.edu/~whiteda/files/Teaching/Pedagogy/Theory%20of%20Pedagogy/Use%20to%20Summarize%20Harvard%20Calc.pdf

Fern Hunt (b. 1948)

Fern Yvette Hunt is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Fern Hunt was born in New York City in 1948. Hunt’s father never finished high school; her mother did not finish college because of financial constraints, but she encouraged Hunt to go to college. Hunt earned her bachelor’s degree at Bryn Mawr College in 1969 and her PhD from the Courant Institute at New York University in 1978. She worked briefly at the University of Utah and then joined the faculty at Howard University, where she stayed for 15 years. In addition to teaching mathematics, Hunt simultaneously held non-academic positions at the National Institutes of Health (1981–1982), the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, 1986–1991), and the GRE Mathematics Advisory Board (1988–1991). In 1993 she left Howard for NBS, which had been renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

At NIST, Hunt works as a research mathematician with interests in bioinformatics, ergodic theory of dynamical systems, probability, and information theory. Her outstanding performance as a NIST mathematical researcher earned her the prestigious Arthur S. Flemming Award for federal employees in 2000. At MathFest 2005, she gave the AWM-MAA (Association for Women in Mathematics-Mathematical Association of America) Etta Z. Falconer Lecture on “Techniques for Visualizing Frequency Patterns in DNA.” She was honored as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019 and as an AWM Fellow in 2020.

In addition to her research contributions, Hunt is an active mentor in the mathematical community. She was an instructor for the inaugural year (1998) of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Program. She also gives outreach talks, using her experiences as a Black woman in mathematics to encourage underrepresented minority students.

References

Ambruso, Kathleen. Fern Y. Hunt. Mathematical Association of America. https://www.maa.org/fern-y-hunt (accessed 25 August 2022).

AMS Secretary. 2019 Class of Fellows of the AMS. Notices of the AMS Vol. 66, No. 3 (March 2019), 433–436. http://www.ams.org/images/NOTI-2019Fellows.pdf (accessed 25 August 2022).

Association for Women in Mathematics. 2020 Class of AWM Fellows. https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2020-awm-fellows/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Association for Women in Mathematics. AWM-MAA Etta Z. Falconer Lecture 2005. https://awm-math.org/awards/falconer-lectures/falconer-lecture-2005/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Black History Month 2017 Honoree: Fern Hunt. Mathematically Gifted & Black. https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/fern-hunt/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Dr. Fern Y. Hunt’s Web Page. National Institute of Standards and Technology. https://math.nist.gov/~FHunt/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

The HistoryMakers. Fern Hunt Biography. 14 September 2012. https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/fern-hunt (accessed 25 August 2022).

Fern Hunt. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern_Hunt (accessed 25 August 2022).

Information Technology Laboratory, Applied & Computational Mathematics Division. Fern Hunt Receives Arthur S. Flemming Award. National Institute of Standards and Technology. June 2000. https://math.nist.gov/mcsd/highlights/hunt-award.html (accessed 25 August 2022).

Williams, Scott W. Black Women in Mathematics: Fern Y. Hunt. Mathematics of the African Diaspora. 2008. http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PEEPS/hunt_ferny.html (accessed 25 August 2022).

Joan Hutchinson (b. 1945)

Joan Prince Hutchinson is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Joan P. Hutchinson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1945. She graduated from Smith College with an honors mathematics major in 1967. Hutchinson worked for a year as a computer programmer at Harvard University before beginning graduate studies at the University of Warwick in England. After one year, Hutchinson returned to the United States and continued her graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a PhD in mathematics in 1973, specializing in combinatorial analysis and graph theory.

Hutchinson held positions at Dartmouth College and Tufts University before joining the faculty at Smith College (1976–1990) and then Macalester College (1990–2011). At both Smith and Macalester, Hutchinson shared a full-time appointment with her husband and fellow mathematician Stan Wagon. During this time, Hutchinson held visiting positions at Carleton College, University of Colorado-Boulder, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), University of Washington, the University of Michigan, Wesleyan University, and the University of Colorado-Denver. She is now Professor Emerita at Macalester College.

She has published more than 70 research articles and co-authored the textbook Discrete Mathematics with Algorithms with frequent collaborator Michael Albertson. Her work has been supported by multiple National Science Foundation grants.

Hutchinson has commented that she enjoys both the abstractness of mathematics and the personal interactions involved in teaching and research. In particular she has informally mentored many younger colleagues, particularly female graph theorists, and promoted their work.

In 1994 she received the Mathematical Association of America (MAA)’s Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for an article in Mathematics Magazine on generalizations of the Four Color Theorem. In 1999, she received the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award from the MAA for excellence in teaching. Colleagues organized a 2005 research conference in honor of her 60th birthday. Hutchinson has served on committees of the MAA, has been active in the SIAM Discrete Math Activity Group, and has been involved in the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) since the early 1970s.

References

Morrow, & Perl, T. (1998). Notable women in mathematics : a biographical dictionary / edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl. Greenwood Press.

Hutchinson, Joan P., Curriculum Vitae, Macalester College. https://www.macalester.edu/~hutchinson/JPHvitae.pdf 

Carl B. Allendoerfer Awards, Mathematical Association of America. https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/writing-awards/carl-b-allendoerfer-awards

Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award, Mathematical Association of America. https://www.maa.org/member-communities/maa-awards/teaching-awards/haimo-award-distinguished-teaching

Patricia Clark Kenschaft (1940–2022)

Patricia Clark Kenschaft is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Patricia Clark Kenschaft completed her BA in mathematics at Swarthmore College in 1961. In 1963, she earned an MS in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania and continued there to complete her PhD in functional analysis in 1973. While doing graduate work, she co-founded the Milldam Nursery School in Concord, MA. After earning her PhD, Kenschaft spent her career at Montclair State University, where she was promoted to professor in 1988 and was Professor Emerita from 2005 until her death in 2022.

Kenschaft advocated for racial equity as a necessity for teaching teachers more mathematics. She chronicled Black mathematicians for at least 15 years, writing at least four articles highlighting individuals and documenting the history of Black mathematicians in the US. Kenschaft addressed the need for more role models with better teaching skills by leading the Project for Resourceful Instruction of Mathematics in Elementary School, where she supervised mathematics teachers and demonstrated remarkable success with pupils in the poorest part of the then-poorest city of Newark, NJ. It was just one of many such projects she led and wrote about for advocating racial equity.

From 1998–2004, Kenschaft hosted a call-in radio talk show, Math Medley, with several Black, Latinx, and Indigenous guests and leaders from various mathematics professional societies. She was the first chair of the Mathematics Association of America (MAA)’s Committee on the Participation of Women, and was the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ chair for integration and diversity.

Kenschaft was awarded the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)’s 2006 Louise Hay Award and the 2012 New Jersey MAA Section Sr. Stephanie Sloyan Distinguished Service Award. She was named a 2021 AWM Fellow in honor of almost half a century of lasting outreach for women and Black people in mathematics.

References

Patricia Clark Kenschaft, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Clark_Kenschaft 

Scott. W. Williams, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, Patricia Kenschaft, Author, The Mathematics Department of The State University of New York at Buffalo, 28 May 1999  http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/special/kenschaft_patricia.html

Fred Marks. Patricia Clark Kenschaft, PhD, Named a Lifetime Achiever by Marquis Who’s Who, Marquis Who’s Who Ventures LLC, 14 December 2017 https://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/447939/patricia-clark-kenschaft-phd-named-a-lifetime-achiever-by-marquis-whos-who

“Department of Mathematics: Faculty and Staff”, Montclair State University. https://www.montclair.edu/mathematics/faculty-staff/ (listed as Emeriti professor)

“Women in the MAA, A Personal Persepctive” Written by Pat Kenschaft. Article in “Women in the MAA” https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/centennial/Women-MAA.pdf. Kenschaft article starts on page 41.

History of MAA Awards: http://sections.maa.org/newjersey/Main/Archives.html.

Autumn Kent (b. 1970s)

Autumn Kent is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Autumn Kent earned undergraduate degrees in mathematics and literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 1999. She continued her education at the University of Texas at Austin, earning her PhD in mathematics in 2006. To date, Kent has published over 25 papers in the areas of hyperbolic geometry and topology.

Kent served as a Tamarkin Assistant Professor at Brown University for four years before joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. She was promoted to associate professor in 2016 and named a Vilas Associate for 2018–2020, recognizing the significance and quality of her research. Kent was promoted to the rank of professor in 2020.

Kent openly identifies as a pansexual trans woman and is an influential advocate and role model for underrepresented groups in mathematics, especially for the LGBTQ+ community. She co-organized the summer 2019 National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored LG&TBQ, a conference to foster ongoing community and collaboration among LGTBQ+ mathematicians working in geometry, topology, and dynamical systems. Kent served on the AWM Policy and Advocacy Committee and the AMS Committee on the Human Rights of Mathematicians, both 2019–2022.

Kent has won numerous awards including the Donald D. Harrington Dissertation Fellowship (2005–2006), an NSF CAREER Award (2014–2019), a von Neumann Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study (2015–2016), and was named a Simons Fellow for 2019–2020. She delivered the inaugural Spectra Lavender Lecture at the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meetings.

References

AEK, https://people.math.wisc.edu/~kent/

LG&TBQ, https://people.math.wisc.edu/~kent/LG&TBQ.about.html

“Mathematics Genealogy Project.” Autumn Kent – The Mathematics Genealogy Project, https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=116135

Autumn Kent, 500 Queer Scientists https://500queerscientists.com/autumn-kent/

Cold, Austere, or Queer (by Autumn Kent), Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey http://digitaleditions.walsworthprintgroup.com/publication/?i=591769&article_id=3394037&view=articleBrowser&ver=html5

Being a Trans Mathematician: A Q&A with Autumn Kent (by Evelyn Lamb), Roots of Unity, Scientific American https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/q-a-with-autumn-kent/

Maria Klawe (b. 1951)

Maria Margaret Klawe is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Maria Klawe obtained her PhD in mathematics from the University of Alberta (1977) and completed graduate studies in computer science at the University of Toronto (1979). Klawe started her career at Oakland University (1977–1978), then was an assistant professor at the University of Toronto (1979–1980). She worked for IBM Research (1980–1989), served as the head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (1988–1995), the NSERC-IBM Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for British Columbia and the Yukon (1997–2002), the Vice-President of Student and Academic Services (1995–1998) and the Dean of Science (1998–2002) in the University of British Columbia. Klawe then served as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University (2003–2006). She is currently the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College and the first woman to hold this position. In fact, she was the first woman in every position she’s held since 1988. She will be leaving her role as president of Harvey Mudd College at the end of June 2023, and will take on the presidency of Math for America in late 2023 when the current president, John Ewing, retires.

Klawe’s research contributions span computer science, discrete mathematics, interactive multimedia for mathematics education, human-computer interactions, and gender issues related to technology. Besides serving on a multitude of boards in professional societies and organizations, such as Math for America and Microsoft Corporation, she has organized several conferences focused on inclusion and diversity. Klawe has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers, including several highlighting the need for more women in STEM fields and particularly computer science.

Klawe has received numerous awards and fellowships, including being named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1996), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009), the American Mathematical Society (inaugural class, 2013), the Association for Women in Mathematics (2019), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2020). She has been awarded more than fifteen honorary doctoral degrees from various universities. Klawe was honored with a 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Association of Computer Science, was named as one of Fortune magazine’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2014, and was featured in Forbes magazine’s America’s Top 50 Women in Tech in 2018.

References

The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers | Maria Klawe. PBS LearningMedia. https://kcts9.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nvslos.math.klawe/maria-klawe/

WEPAN Women in Engineering ProActive Network, STEM Thought Leader – Maria Klawe. https://www.wepan.org/page/InterviewKlawe

Fulbright Canada Board of Directors https://www.fulbright.ca/about-us/board-of-directors/current-board-members/maria-klawe-bio.html 

Kantrowitz, Alex. She Advocated For Women, Then Microsoft Pushed Her Off Its Board. https://onezero.medium.com/she-advocated-for-women-then-microsoft-pushed-her-off-its-board-80686fe8c679 

Curriculum Vitae of Maria Klawe, (last updated September 2021)  https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/presidents-office/president-maria-klawe/cv-maria-klawe/ 

Nandi Leslie (b. 1970s)

Nandi Leslie is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; mathematics in business, industry, and government and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Nandi Leslie obtained her PhD from Princeton University in 2005. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland College Park (2005–2007) and then as a senior Operations Research Analyst at Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. (2007–2015). Leslie was the first Black woman to become an Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, where she has worked since 2015. This technical honor ranks her among the top 3% of engineers at the company. Leslie is also an Adjunct professor in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Program at Johns Hopkins University. In addition, she is a visiting professor at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Senegal.

Leslie has published more than 50 papers in applied mathematics, machine learning, data science, and cyber security. She holds a patent for In-Vehicle Network Intrusion Detection Using Unsupervised Learning. Leslie has worked with the Navy on submarine force security and submarine tracking, with the Army on network resilience and robustness, and also with both the US Department of Homeland Security and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Leslie co-founded the non-profit College Advocate in 2008 and served as a Board member until 2015. The organization assists Washington, D.C. high-school students in gaining admission to top colleges around the United States. In 2020, Leslie earned recognition as the recipient of the Outstanding Technical Contribution in Industry Award at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards.

References

A mathematician from the start, Raytheon Intelligence & Space, February 24, 2021. https://www.raytheonintelligenceandspace.com/news/2021/02/24/mathematician-start

United States Patent Application Publication, June 9, 2022. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/d4/2a/ef/d5ff024a43b743/US20220182402A1.pdf

Nandi Leslie, Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=F7goaq0AAAAJ&hl=en

Interview with Lisa Martin for Women in Data Science, Youtube.  Posted March 7, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWdP4hZl7Q

About College Advocate, Youtube.  Posted February 23, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU2C174tMD0

Top Employer honors Outstanding Mathematician at BEYA 2020, US Black Engineer Information Technology magazine, February 27, 2020. https://www.blackengineer.com/news/top-employer-honors-outstanding-mathematician-at-beya-2020/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nandileslie/

Xiaoye Sherry Li (b. 1960s)

Xiaoye Sherry Li is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Xiaoye Sherry Li earned her PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, following a BS at Tsinghua University, China (1986), and an MS at Pennsylvania State University (1990). Since her graduation, Li has worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now heads the Scalable Solvers Group in the Computational Research Division. She contributes to projects at the Department of Energy, such as the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC), the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), and at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

Li’s dissertation “Sparse Gaussian Elimination on High Performance Computers” became the SuperLU software package. Her work makes it possible to solve large systems of linear equations which are sparse, meaning that many coefficients are zero, a common situation in applications. She is also an expert in high-precision arithmetic. Her contributions to this research area include a role in the design of the ARPREC package for carrying out computation with arbitrarily high precision. Li has co-authored over 130 publications.

She has contributed to the development of a wide range of mathematical software, paying particular attention to optimizing methods for parallel computing. Li has worked to apply this specialized mathematical software in areas as diverse as accelerator engineering, chemical science, earth science, plasma fusion energy science, and materials science.

Li was named a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2016 and is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

References

https://crd.lbl.gov/divisions/amcr/applied-mathematics-dept/scalable-solvers/members/staff-members/xiaoye-li/

https://cs.lbl.gov/news-media/news/2016/crd-s-xiaoye-sherry-li-named-2016-siam-fellow/

Sallie P. Mead (1893–1981)

Sallie Pero Mead is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Sallie Pero Mead obtained her MA from Columbia University in 1914 after graduating from Barnard College the year before. She was an engineer at AT&T, first in the Development & Research section, then at Bell Labs.

Born in Manhattan, Mead entered Barnard College before her 16th birthday and distinguished herself academically, receiving the Kohn Mathematical Prize on her graduation. After earning her MA degree, she briefly taught high school mathematics before taking a job as a computer at AT&T, where she contributed to the study of traffic problems by finding expansions for probability distributions.

Mead was soon promoted to Engineer and developed an expertise in transmission cables, becoming the first woman at AT&T to hold a patent after designing an equalizer for long submarine cables. With the development of radar in the 1930s, it was necessary to develop methods of transmission for microwaves; Mead contributed to critical discoveries for transmission of high frequency waves, enabling AT&T to secure the contract to provide waveguides for the US military.

During World War II, she was involved in the development of fire control systems and, when the war ended, she returned to probabilistic studies of traffic.
In 1923, Mead was elected to membership of the American Mathematical Society, and in 1924 she was one of only four female members in nonacademic positions. She was the first woman to publish a technical report in the Bell System Technical Journal (1925). At a time when young women entering AT&T generally had short careers working as human computers, Mead’s long and successful career is noteworthy.

References

https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/today-we-celebrate-invaluable-contributions-women-technologists-nokia-bell-labs/#gref

https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/sallie-p-mead-an-industrial-mathematician-in-the-early-20th-century fbclid=IwAR2T_w0DQNYKjIuzWkQPa_nZoqN_CQUUrXVaJliYGqGM5Eix7fMLKeBKTfI

https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Site-Technical/Company-Pubications/Archive-Bell-Technology-IDX/IDX/30s/Bell-1935c.o-OCR-Page-0183.pdf

Shirley Ann Mathis McBay (1935–2021)

Shirley McBay is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Born in rural, segregated Georgia, USA (1935), Shirley Ann Mathis McBay graduated summa cum laude with a BA in chemistry from Paine College (1954). While also teaching chemistry at Spelman College (1955–63), McBay earned an MS in chemistry (1957) and MS in mathematics (1958) from Atlanta University. In 1964, she was awarded a United Negro College Fund Fellowship that allowed her to earn a PhD in mathematics in 1966 from the University of Georgia. She was the first Black person to earn a PhD from the University of Georgia, just five years after the university was desegregated.

Over a 15-year period at Spelman College, McBay served as mathematics faculty, Mathematics Department Chair (1970), Natural Sciences Division Chair (1972–75), and Associate Academic Dean (1973–75). She was instrumental in the creation of the Division of Natural Sciences (1972). During her time as Academic Dean, she created pre-freshman summer programs to increase interest in science majors.

She left Spelman in 1975 to take a position at the Science Education Directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF) (1975–80). At NSF, McBay directed two national programs designed to increase minority participation in science and engineering. From 1980 to 1990, she was the Dean of Student Affairs at MIT, where starting in 1987 she also served as the Director of the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) project. This was the impetus for the QEM Network that McBay founded and was president of from 1990 to 2016. At QEM, Dr. McBay provided leadership for numerous projects focused on broadening participation in STEM and/or achieving educational equity for underserved students and communities across the nation.

She was awarded the 2009 American Chemical Society Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences, and in 2021, the University of Georgia’s Science Library was renamed the Shirley Mathis McBay Science Library in her honor. The annual Mathematical Association of America-Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics-American Mathematical Society Hrabowski-Gates-Tapia-McBay lecture held at the Joint Mathematics Meetings is also named in her honor.

References

https://qem.org/about-qem/
https://www.ams.org/meetings/lectures/hgtm-lect
https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/shirley-mathis-mcbay/
https://archive.org/details/blackwomenscient00warr
https://www.libs.uga.edu/science
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PEEPS/mcbay_shirley_mathis.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_McBay
https://books.google.com/books?id=SlN7iicbHMAC&pg=PA127#v=onepage&q&f=false (first African American to receive a doctorate from the University of Georgia)

Veena Mendiratta (b. 1948)

Veena Bhatia Mendiratta is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Veena Mendiratta received her BTech in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (New Delhi) in 1970, and then earned her PhD from Northwestern University in Operations Research in 1981. She worked for AT&T/Lucent/Bell Labs (currently under the name Nokia Bell Labs) for more than 35 years doing research on network reliability and telecom data analytics. Mendiratta is currently an Adjunct Professor in Northwestern’s Master of Science in Analytics program.

Mendiratta has authored or coauthored more than 65 research papers and holds 5 US patents. She has done outreach through the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics as part of their Visiting Lecturer Program. As part of the Fulbright Specialist Program, Mendiratta did project-based exchanges at host institutions in India (2012) and Norway (2015).

References

“Faculty Directory Veena Mendiratta.” McCormick School of Engineering, https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/research-faculty/directory/affiliated/mendiratta-veena.html. Accessed 19 Jun. 2022. 

Veena Mendiratta – Adjunct Faculty Member – Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/veenamendiratta. Accessed 19 Jun. 2022. 

https://attend.ieee.org/wieails-2019/speakers/dr-veena-mendiratta/

​​https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&f=S&l=50&d=PTXT&Query=IN%2F%22Mendiratta%2C+Veena%22

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gzO3HtAAAAAJ

https://www.siam.org/students-education/programs-initiatives/siam-visiting-lecturer-program/profiles

https://fulbrightspecialist.worldlearning.org/directory#view-all-fsp-directories/ 

Perla Myers (b. 1968)

Perla Lahana Myers is featured for her contributions to mathematics education; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Perla Lahana Myers earned her BS in mathematics from the University of Houston Honors Program, and her MS and PhD (1995) from the University of California, San Diego. Her current position is Professor of Mathematics and Executive Director of the Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education at the University of San Diego (USD). She has also served USD as the Director of K–12 Community Engagement and Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to this, she worked at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Myers is dedicated to advancing equity and diversity initiatives in education, especially for Latinx and Black families. She uses experiential learning pedagogies to build mathematical communities in both K–12 and higher education. She leads culturally affirming STEM learning experiences using Minecraft, origami, enrichment programs, and multilevel mathematical mentoring. With her colleagues, Myers created multilevel programs, such as the STEAM Academy and MathWonder: Inquiry-based Mathematics Explorations project, where undergraduates engage high school students who in turn engage middle school students in mathematical explorations.

Administratively, she works to cultivate diverse faculty communities through cohort hires. Using funding such as a 2011 NSF-ADVANCE grant, Myers’s initiatives have increased the numbers of women and underrepresented groups among the USD faculty. This work has been replicated at other universities.
Myers was awarded USD’s 2002 Innovations in Experiential Education, a 2011 Women of Impact Award, and the ​​2013 MAA Southern California-Nevada section teaching award. She has received numerous NSF grants, including the 2019 VisMO: “Fostering Elementary School Students’ Visuospatial Skills and Mathematical Competencies through an Origami-based Program,” the 2020 S-STEM Project AnchorSTEM: “Engaging with Community for Undergraduate Student Success in Mathematics, Science and Engineering,” and the 2022 ITEST “Project SPAC3: A Culturally Relevant Approach to Spatial Computational Thinking Skills and Career Awareness through an Immersive Virtual Environment.” Myers was also a recipient of the California Mathematics and U.S. Department of Education Science Partnership Grant (2005–2008) for an Inquiry Learning project with the Fleet Science Center and K–12 partners.

References

https://www.sandiego.edu/directory/biography.php?profile_id=367 Accessed June 24, 2022

USD News Center, 2013; Accessed June 24, 2022 https://www.sandiego.edu/news/detail.php?_focus=45249 

Mathematics Association of America Southern California-Nevada Section, n.d.; Accessed June 24, 2022 http://sections.maa.org/socalnv/TeachingAwardPast.html#Myers 

USD News Center, 2020; Accessed June 24, 2022 https://www.sandiego.edu/news/detail.php?_focus=77709 

National Science Foundation, n.d.; Accessed June 24, 2022 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1713547 

Project VisMO, n.d.;Accessed June 24, 2022 https://www.projectvismo.com/people 

http://home.sandiego.edu/~pmyers/ Accessed June 24, 2022

https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=40153 Accessed June 24, 2022

Aisha Nájera (b. 1981)

Aisha Nájera is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Aisha Nájera completed her BSc at the National University of Mexico (2004), her MSc at the University of Arizona (2006), and her PhD in applied mathematics at Claremont Graduate University (2015). Between her MSc and PhD work, Nájera was a technical consultant for IBM (2008–2010) working on software implementations and with strategic business opportunities for some of IBM’s largest global clients. Upon completing her PhD, she started working at RAND Corporation as an associate mathematician (2016) and was promoted to mathematician in 2019.

Nájera’s work focuses on analytics and modeling applications that make use of algorithms, data analysis, and artificial intelligence. She has worked on topics such as supply chain management, impacts of emerging technologies, and national security. Her work generates insights that inform strategic decisions, improve data quality, and manage risks. Broader academic interests she pursues include ensuring diverse perspectives in data science practices, Latinx social movements, and using data and computational methods to work on gender equity.

In 2019, Nájera co-organized a workshop for Women in Mathematics and Public Policy at IPAM-UCLA with funding from the NSF. She later co-edited the book Research in Mathematics and Public Policy (2020) based on the workshop. The goal of the workshop was to assemble interdisciplinary and diverse teams from industry and academia to work on pressing policy questions related to climate change and cybersecurity. For this work, Nájera received a Spotlight Award from the RAND Corporation.

Nájera has provided mentorship and community service such as teaching mathematics at elementary schools for Spanish-speaking immigrant parents. She has given invited talks at cybersecurity events for girls, asked to offer career advice to high school students, and served on career panels at AWM and IPAM conferences.

References

Aisha Najera  https://www.rand.org/about/people/n/najera_chesler_aisha.html Last access 2022-07-12

Lathisms 2021. Aisha Najera Chesler Mathematician, RAND Corporation. https://www.lathisms.org/calendar-2021s/aisha-najera-chesler Last accessed 2022-07-12

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aishanajerachesler/ Last accessed 2022-08-30

Omayra Y. Ortega (b. late 1970s)

Omayra Y. Ortega is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; mathematics in business, industry, and government; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Omayra Y. Ortega grew up in Queens, New York City. She earned BA degrees in music and pure mathematics from Pomona College in 2001. She then pursued an MPH (2005) and an MS (2005) and PhD (2008) in applied mathematics and computational sciences at the University of Iowa. She taught at Arizona State University from 2006 to 2015 while also holding positions in a variety of summer scholar programs and public health research groups. From 2015 to 2017 Ortega worked as a healthcare analyst on the Data Science & Advanced Analytics Team at Health Services Advisory Group. She is currently an associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Sonoma State University.

Ortega’s research focuses on rotaviruses and other topics in mathematical epidemiology, applications of mathematical epidemiology in developing countries, mathematical and computational biology, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. She has also worked to increase the participation of women and minorities in STEM. For instance, she has organized an annual Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day at each of her institutions since 2006. She has directed the Mathematical Epidemiology Research Group for undergraduates since 2009. Ortega regularly gives academic and public presentations on equity and career development.

She is currently the President of the National Association of Mathematicians (2021–2024), having previously served as the editor of the NAM Newsletter and chair of the Publicity and Publications Committee (2018–2021). She is also on the editorial board for NAM’s contributions to the MAA Math Values Blog. Ortega received an AWM Service Award in 2020 and was named a 2023 AWM Fellow. She will deliver the Hrabowski-Gates-Tapia-McBay Lecture at the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings.

References

American Mathematical Society. Hrabowski-Gates-Tapia-McBay Lecture and Panel. https://www.ams.org/meetings/lectures/hgtm-lect (accessed 25 August 2022).

Association for Women in Mathematics. AWM Service Award 2020. https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-service-award/awm-service-award-2020/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Black History Month 2020 Honoree: Omayra Ortega. https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/omayra-ortega/ (accessed 25 August 2022).

Mathematical Association of America. Project NExT Fellows. https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/professional-development/project-next/fellows (accessed 25 August 2022).

National Association of Mathematicians. https://www.nam-math.org (accessed 25 August 2022).

Omayra Ortega. Math Alliance:Building a New American Community in the Mathematical and Statistical Sciences. The National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Sciences. https://mathalliance.org/ (accessed 3 January 2023).

Omayra Ortega. Mathematics & Statistics, Sonoma State University. http://math.sonoma.edu/faculty-staff/omayra-ortega (accessed 25 August 2022).

Omayra Ortega. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omayra_Ortega (accessed 25 August 2022).

Ortega, Omayra, and Anisah Nu’Man. Finding Community at MAA MathFest with the New NAM-MAA Blog Editors. MAA Math Values Blog. 23 July 2019. https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/finding-community-at-maa-mathfest-with-the-new-nam-maa-blog-editors (accessed 25 August 2022).

Prof. Omayra Ortega. Personal Website. https://omayraortega.wixsite.com/math (accessed 25 August 2022).

Sonoma State University News. SSU Mathematics Professor Recognized as One of America’s Inspiring Black Scientists. 24 February 2021. https://news.sonoma.edu/article/ssu-mathematics-professor-recognized-one-america’s-inspiring-black-scientists (accessed 25 August 2022).

Raman Parimala (b. 1948)

Raman Parimala is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Raman Parimala was born in India in 1948. She earned her PhD in mathematics from Bombay University (1976). She then joined the faculty at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. She has held visiting positions around the world, including at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and MSRI. Since 2005, she has been the Arts and Science Distinguished Professor at Emory University.

Parimala’s research is primarily in algebra, specifically in quadratic forms, Galois cohomology, and algebraic groups. She has published several expository articles in addition to over 100 research papers. Parimala has served on the editorial board of multiple journals. To date, she has advised ten PhD students, including 6 women.

Parimala was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Zürich in 1994. In 2010, she was an invited plenary speaker at the ICM and at the International Conference of Women in Mathematics, a satellite of the ICM, in Hyderabad, India. She also gave the AWM-AMS (Association for Women in Mathematics-American Mathematical Society) Emmy Noether Lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego in 2013.

Parimala has been on the mathematical sciences jury for the Infosys Prize (2019–2021) and serves on the selection committee for the Abel Prize (2021–2023).
Parimala is a fellow of all three Indian academies of science: the National Academy of Sciences, India (1987), the Indian Academy of Sciences (1988), and the Indian National Science Academy (1990). She was selected as an AMS fellow in 2013. Her research has been recognized with the Bhatnagar Prize in 1987, an honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne in 1999, the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award in 2003 and the 2005 prize for Mathematics from the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World.

In 2020, eleven Indian female scientists were honored by having chairs in their name installed at institutions throughout the country. Parimala was both the only mathematician and the only living woman to receive this honor.

References

Published in Sci-Illustrate Stories https://medium.com/sci-illustrate-stories/raman-parimala-6c345d4f528e

Meet Parimala Raman, Mathematician & Fellow of All 3 Indian Academies of Science https://www.thebetterindia.com/218945/indian-woman-scientist-parimala-raman-algebra-mathematician-inspiring

Biographies of Young Women Mathematicians https://mathwomen.agnesscott.org/women/parimala.htm

The Mathematics Genealogy Project https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=59460

Emory College https://www.math.emory.edu/people/faculty/individual.php?NUM=7

AMS Fellow Reference: https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/women-who-figure/feature/and-the-list-goes-on

11 women scientists the new STEM chairs are named after https://theprint.in/science/these-are-the-11-indian-women-scientists-the-new-stem-chairs-are-named-after/374077/

Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger (b. 1948)

Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities; and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger earned a BSc (1969) and MSc (1972) at the University of Queensland in Australia before completing her D Phil at the University of Oxford in 1973. After a research fellowship at Australian National University that included a semester teaching at the University of Virginia, she began working at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 1976. In 1989, she earned a Doctor of Science degree at UWA. She became Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow upon her retirement in 2017. She is currently serving as a Member of the National Science and Technology Council of Australia.

Praeger published her first paper in 1970 when she was still an undergraduate. She has since written over 400 papers with more than 200 co-authors. Her work encompasses permutation groups, group actions, combinatorial designs, computational group theory, graph theory, and more.
She has supervised 31 doctoral students and many other research students, including students from universities in the Philippines, South Korea, Iran, and China and Fields Medalist Akshay Venkatesh. She built up the research program at UWA and abroad in countries such as China. She promotes the participation of women in mathematics by encouraging girls in primary and secondary schools with lectures, workshops, conferences and through the Family Maths Program Australia (FAMPA), which she was instrumental in implementing in local primary schools.

In addition to holding multiple leadership positions at UWA, Praeger was the first woman to be president of the Australian Mathematical Society (1992–1994) and the second woman to become full professor of mathematics at an Australian university (1983). She has received numerous honorary doctorates from universities around the world and multiple awards that include being named a 2013 American Mathematical Society Fellow.  Praeger became the first ever female recipient of both the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal of the Australian Academy of Science (2013) and the George Szekeres Medal of the Australian Mathematical Society (2014). In 2021, Praeger was the second mathematician to be awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia which is the highest honor awarded to a citizen in Australia.

References

https://www.chiefscientist.gov.au/national-science-and-technology-council

Australian Government, Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources. 2019 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science: Emeritus Professor Cheryl Praeger. https://www.industry.gov.au/data-and-publications/prime-ministers-prizes-for-science-2015-to-2018/2019-prize-recipients/2019-prime-ministers-prize-for-science (accessed 22 June 2022).

Australian Government, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Emeritus Professor Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger. Australian Honours Search Facility. https://honours.pmc.gov.au/honours/awards/2008257 (accessed 22 June 2022).

Bullen, James. Prime Minister’s science prizes go to trailblazing mathematician and anti-cancer drug team. ABC Science. 16 October 2019. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-10-17/2019-prime-ministers-science-prizes-cheryl-praeger-venetoclax/11608390 (accessed 22 June 2022).

Cheryl Praeger. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Praeger (accessed 22 June 2022).

Cheryl Praeger: Personal Profile. UWA Profiles and Research Repository. The University of Western Australia. https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/cheryl-praeger (accessed 22 June 2022).

O’Connor, J. J., and E. F. Robertson. Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive. Last updated September 2009. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Praeger/ (accessed 22 June 2022).

Profile: Emeritus Professor Cheryl E Praeger. The University of Western Australia. https://www.uwa.edu.au/profile/cheryl-praeger (accessed 22 June 2022).

Whitty, Robin. Praeger’s Theorem on Bounded Movement. Theorem of the Day. https://www.theoremoftheday.org/GroupTheory/Movement/TotDMovement.pdf (accessed 22 June 2022).

Cheryl E. Praeger: Agnes Scott page

Dionne Price (b. 1970s)

Dionne Price is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Born and raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, Dionne Price was inspired to pursue biostatistics during a summer internship at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the National Institutes of Health. She held the internship—and others at MIT and NASA—while she was an undergraduate in the Dozoretz National Institute for Minorities in Applied Sciences of Norfolk State University (BS, 1993). Price went on to earn degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (MS) and Emory University (PhD, 2000), where she was the first Black person awarded a doctorate in biostatistics.

Price has spent her entire career to date in the US Food & Drug Administration, most recently as Director of the Division of Biometrics IV in the Office of Biostatistics. She is currently the Deputy Director of the Office of Biostatistics in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Her research focuses on the experimental design of clinical trials. She leads collaborative efforts to improve methodologies for pharmaceutical drug development and regulation, and has reviewed products for treating Ebola and coronavirus.

She was elected the first Black president of the American Statistical Association (ASA, 2023). Price was named a fellow of the ASA in 2018 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2022). She has also held numerous other leadership positions in the society, including chair, secretary, and program-chair of its Biopharmaceutical Section. She has also served on the regional advisory board of the International Biometric Society. Price is sought after as a keynote speaker, including at StatFest 2016 (a conference that encouraged underrepresented groups to study statistics) and at multiple Global Annual Meetings of the Drug Information Association.

References

American Statistical Association. Dionne Price Elected 2023 ASA President. AmStat News. 1 July 2021. https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2021/07/01/price-elected-2023-president/ (accessed 20 June 2022).

McKinney, Megan. The Sky is the Limit When it Comes to Mathematics: Dionne Price. Association for Women in Mathematics Student Essay Contest. 2002. https://awm-math.org/awards/student-essay-contest/2002-student-essay-contest-results/college-level-honorable-mention/ (accessed 20 June 2022).

The Network of Minorities in Mathematical Sciences. Dionne Price: Black History Month 2021 Honoree. Mathematically Gifted & Black. 2022. https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/dionne-price/ (accessed 20 June 2022).

Math genealogy resource: https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=64560

Amstat News
https://magazine.amstat.org/blog/2020/02/01/dionne-price/

Amstat News
https://community.amstat.org/cmis/events/statfest2016

Ami Radunskaya (b. 1950s)

Ami Radunskaya is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities, and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Ami Radunskaya earned her PhD from Stanford University in 1992. She is currently the Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College and a member of the Extended Graduate Faculty of Claremont Graduate University. She previously worked as a G.C. Evans Instructor at Rice University.

Radunskaya’s research involves dynamical systems and mathematical modeling of biological applications of non-linear models in areas such as tumor growth and drug delivery. She has advised multiple PhD students, as well as over 150 undergraduate theses.

Radunskaya is deeply invested in building a diverse community of mathematicians. She was president of the AWM (2017–2019) and is currently president of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Foundation as well as a Principal Investigator on several EDGE grants.

Radunskaya has been a cellist for the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and is a published composer. Her musical and mathematical backgrounds combined in her composition Nefarious Networks, a string quartet that premiered at the 2020 Joint Mathematics Meetings.

She has earned many awards, including the Mentor of the Year Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017). She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2017) “for contributions to mathematical oncology, immuno-dynamics, and applications of dynamical systems to medicine, and for service to the mathematical community” and of the Association for Women in Mathematics (2021) ​​”for her career-long efforts to invite women into our profession by learning about people’s individual journeys and driving the community to be more welcoming of diverse pathways into mathematics via her work during her AWM presidency and as co-director of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education summer program.”

References

Pomona College News: Nine Faculty Members Appointed to Endowed Professorships, June 14, 2022
https://www.pomona.edu/news/2022/06/14-nine-faculty-members-appointed-endowed-professorships 

The EDGE Foundation: About the foundation (Accessed 6/30/2022)
https://www.edgeforwomen.org/support-edge/the-edge-foundation/

Mathematics Genealogy Project: Ami Elizabeth Radunskaya (Accessed 6/30/2022)
https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=39238

Pomona College Directory: Ami E. Radunskaya (Accessed 6/30/2022)
https://www.pomona.edu/directory/people/ami-e-radunskaya

Dr. Radunskaya’s Page (Accessed 6/30/2022)
https://pages.pomona.edu/~aer04747/

Meet a Mathematician! (Accessed 6/30/2022)
https://youtu.be/ZXmJwSd9NIE

JMM 2020: Social Events (Accessed 6/30/2022)
https://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2020/2245_social

Kavita Ramanan (b. 1970s)

Kavita Ramanan is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Born in Chennai, India and raised in Bombay (now Mumbai), Kavita Ramanan received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1992 from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. She was awarded her PhD in 1998 in applied mathematics from Brown University.  She is currently the Roland George Dwight Richardson University Professor and Associate Chair at Brown University.  Ramanan previously held positions at the Technion in Israel (Postdoctoral Fellow, 1997), Bell Labs (1997–2002), and Carnegie Mellon University (2003–2009), and as Deputy and Associate Directors of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University (2020–2021). 

Mathematically, Ramanan’s interests are in probability theory, stochastic processes, and their applications to fields such as operations research, engineering, statistical physics, and neuroscience.  Her work combines tools from discrete probability, stochastic analysis, and partial differential equations.  She holds four patents related to these applications.

Through her outreach activities, Ramanan has promoted inclusivity and communicating mathematics to diverse audiences.  She founded and runs a math outreach group at Brown called the Math CoOp, and through that group started the SEAM (Social Equity and Applied Mathematics) seminar and an English-Spanish bilingual math outreach program called Mathematics Sin Fronteras.

Ramanan has won numerous awards, including the Erlang Prize of the Applied Probability Society of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (2006), the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Medallion (2015), a Simons Fellowship (2018), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020) and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2021).  She is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2013), the American Mathematical Society (2018), the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (2018), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2019), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2020), and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).

Ramanan is also a professionally trained singer of Carnatic (South Indian Classical) music.  She has given concerts at major events in several states.

References

Wikipedia contributors, “Kavita Ramanan,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kavita_Ramanan&oldid=1090292260 (accessed July 14, 2022). 

“Kavita Ramanan, Home”, https://www.brown.edu/academics/applied-mathematics/faculty/kavita-ramanan/home

“Researchers@Brown:  Kavita Ramanan, https://vivo.brown.edu/display/kramanan

“CANCELED: The Art of the Tillana with Kavita Ramanan”, https://cisar.iar.ubc.ca/events/event/the-art-of-the-tillana/

Annie Raymond (b. 1986)

Annie Raymond is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Annie Raymond was born in Montreal, Canada. She earned undergraduate degrees in mathematics and music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009, and obtained her PhD from Technische Universität Berlin in 2014. While in graduate school, Raymond was also affiliated with the Berlin Mathematical School and the Zuse Institute Berlin, an interdisciplinary research institute for applied mathematics and data-intensive high-performance computing. Raymond is currently in a tenurable position in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has published in polyhedral combinatorics, combinatorial optimization, operations research, and applied algebraic geometry, working with many co-authors along the way.

Raymond demonstrates a deep commitment to diversifying representation and participation in mathematics. She runs _forall on Instagram and www.mathisforall.com, both of which feature interviews with women and people of color in mathematics. After teaching courses for college credit at Monroe Correctional Complex (Washington State Reformatory) and then San Quentin State Prison, Raymond initiated math circles, a lecture series, and college-level mathematics courses at the Hampshire County Jail. She gives outreach presentations to K–12 students multiple times each year. She has supervised at least seven Research Experiences for Undergraduates projects, many of which involved students who are women or people of color. In addition, Raymond sustains and enhances mathematical communities by co-organizing workshops, seminars, and conference sessions.

References

https://people.math.umass.edu/~raymond/

https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=206150

https://mathisforall.com/

https://www.cns.umass.edu/news-events/news/picture-mathematician-now-be-pleasantly-surprised

Beatrice Riviere (b. 1971)

Beatrice Riviere is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and mathematics in business, industry, and government.

Beatrice Riviere completed an Engineering Diploma from Ecole Centrale, France (1995) and earned an MA from Penn State University (1996). She earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin (2000). Riviere is currently the Noah Harding Chair and Professor in the Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at Rice University.

She has authored over one hundred scientific publications in numerical analysis and scientific computation. Riviere wrote the 2008 book Discontinuous Galerkin methods for solving elliptic and parabolic equations: theory and implementation, which has been cited over 1200 times. To date, she has successfully mentored nineteen PhD students, eleven of whom are working in academia, one in a national lab, and seven in industry.

Riviere was named a SIAM Fellow in 2021 for her contributions in numerical analysis, scientific computing, and modeling of porous media. Also in 2021, she was elected to SIAM’s Board of Trustees for a two-year term. She is currently the President of the SIAM TX-LA Section and has served as Chair and Secretary of the SIAM Activity Group on Geosciences. Riviere is an associate editor for two SIAM journals: SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and SIAM Journal for Numerical Analysis. She is also a member of the editorial boards of Advances in Water Resources and Results in Applied Mathematics. Riviere was named an AWM Fellow in 2022.

References

Wikipedia, Last accessed July 10, 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Rivi%C3%A8re

“Beatrice M. Rivière”, Computational and Applied Mathematics Faculty, Rice University, retrieved July 10, 2022. https://profiles.rice.edu/faculty/beatrice-riviere

https://www.siam.org/prizes-recognition/fellows-program/all-siam-fellows/class-of-2021

https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/meet-siams-newest-leadership-19 

https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2022-fellows/

Angela Robinson (b. 1971)

Angela Robinson is featured for her contributions to mathematics in business, industry, and government and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Angela Robinson earned her BS in mathematics at Baylor University in 2010, followed by MS and PhD degrees from Florida Atlantic University. Since completing her PhD in 2018, she has been working as a mathematician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Cryptographic Technology Group. Prior to completing her PhD, she participated in the Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program (2016).

After learning about cryptography in high school, Robinson was exposed to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) at PQC Summer School while still a PhD student. Her research now involves both post-quantum cryptography and privacy enhancing cryptography. She has worked on industry standards for zero knowledge proofs, which enable a party’s data to be verified without revealing the data to another party.

Robinson enjoys engaging with underrepresented groups in mathematics and building communities within mathematics to better support such groups. She established an AWM student chapter at Florida Atlantic University, served as a Women and Mathematics Postdoctoral Ambassador for the Institute of Advanced Studies, and helps organize the annual Girls Talk Math UMD summer camp specially designed for high school girls. Robinson was one of Mathematically Gifted and Black’s 2021 Black History Month honorees and was featured in the American Mathematical Society’s Mathematical Moments capsule on Securing Data in the Quantum Era.

References

Angela Robinson, Black History Month 2021 Honoree, Mathematically Gifted & Black https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/angela-robinson/

 Robinson, Angela.  Staff spotlight:  NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography, Cybersecurity Insights, National Institute of Standards and Technology, September 14, 2020. https://www.nist.gov/blogs/cybersecurity-insights/staff-spotlight-nist-post-quantum-cryptography

 Securing Data in the Quantum Era, Mathematical Moments #158, American Mathematical Society https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/mathmoments/mm158-post-quantum-cryptography

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-robinson-12852313/

https://gage.500womenscientists.org/profile/28363

Judith Roitman (b. 1945)

Judith Roitman is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; mathematics education and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

Judith Roitman attended Oberlin College and then graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a degree in English literature in 1966. Interested in mathematical linguistics, she took mathematics courses at both San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, after which she earned her PhD in mathematics from Berkeley in 1974. During graduate school, Roitman taught mathematics in elementary schools through Project SEED. After graduating, she taught at Wellesley College for three years, spent one semester at the Institute for Advanced Study, and then joined the faculty at the University of Kansas, from which she retired in 2014. She is currently a guiding teacher of Buddhism at the Kansas Zen Center.

Roitman has published more than 35 papers in set theory applied to topology and Boolean algebra. She wrote the 1990 book Introduction to Modern Set Theory. Her work was supported by several National Science Foundation grants (1976–1987). Roitman believes that working to improve mathematics education is a professional responsibility of mathematicians, and so ran teacher workshops starting in 1988 with titles such as “Math Alive!” and “What kind of @#$%! mathematics is my kid learning these days?” She was also a member of the writing group for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (1997–2000).

During her graduate studies, Roitman became active in the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and served as the first newsletter editor. She moved on to serve as President of the AWM (1979–1981).

Roitman’s poetry has appeared in several magazines and books. She has published both chapbooks and volumes of poetry, including No Face: Selected and New Poems (2008).

Roitman received the 1996 AWM Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education. Her educational policy service includes the Mathematical Sciences Education Board (MSEB) on College and University Programs (1992–1995), the AMS Committee on Education (1993–2002), the MAA Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (1997–1998), the AWM Committee on Education (2000–2002) and the Mathematics Education and Reform (MER) Advisory Board (1992–1995). She is a fellow of both the American Mathematical Society (2013) and the AWM (2018).

References

Judith Roitman, Wikipedia, Last accessed: 7/1/2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Roitman

Judith Roitman, Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Last accessed: 7/1/2022, https://mathwomen.agnesscott.org/women/roitman.htm

List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, AMS American Mathematical Society, Last accessed: 7/1/2022, https://www.ams.org/cgi-bin/fellows/fellows.cgi#r

2018 Inaugural Class of AWM Fellows, AWM Association for Women in Mathematics, Last accessed: 7/1/2022, https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2018-awm-fellows/

https://www.ams.org/about-us/governance/committees/maacupm-past.html

Lion’s Roar Buddhist wisdom for our time, Last accessed: 1/7/2022, https://www.lionsroar.com/author/judy-roitman/

Laurie Rubel (b. 1970s)

Laurie Rubel is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Laurie Rubel earned her BS in mathematics and computer science from Haverford College (1992), followed by secondary teacher certification (1995) and an MA in mathematics education (1996) from Tel Aviv University. She was a mathematics teacher and department head at the Collegiate School in NYC (1997–2002) and earned her PhD in mathematics education from Teachers College, Columbia University (2002). Rubel was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002–2003) and then joined the secondary education faculty of Brooklyn College, City University of New York (2003–2018), where she was active in GLARE (GLBTQ Advocacy in Research and Education). Currently, she is an associate professor and the Department Chair of mathematics education at the University of Haifa.

Rubel’s research focuses on sociocultural contexts and equity in mathematics education, as well as the use of real-world urban contexts in the teaching of mathematics. She received a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (2008–2014) and her research has also been supported by the Spencer Foundation and the Israel Science Foundation. Rubel has published over 50 research articles in journals such as the Journal of Research in Mathematics Education and the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education. Her publications reflect particular interest in gender and mathematics teaching and learning, data science education, and teaching mathematics with consciousness of place to achieve social justice.

Rubel was awarded the 2006 Young Scholar Award from Knowles Science Teaching Foundation. In 2014–2015 Rubel was awarded a Tow Distinguished Fellowship at Brooklyn College and, in 2015, was named a Distinguished Fellow of the Advanced Research Collaborative at CUNY Graduate Center. She was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar by the US Department of State in 2017. In 2018 Rubel was an invited speaker for the Annual Meeting of Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators and for the Annual Meeting of Psychology of Mathematics Education.

References

CV:  https://lrubel.edu.haifa.ac.il/CV

Laurie H. Rubel, Mathematics Genealogy Project, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=110175 

Brooklyn College, Contact Us, GLARE, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/schools/education/partnerships/glare/contact.php 

Brooklyn College, 2012, Honors, Awards and Grants, Archives, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/faculty/awards/archive/2012.php

Brooklyn College, 2017, Honors, Awards and Grants, Archives, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/faculty/awards/archive/2017.php

Laurie Rubel, National Science Foundation, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText=Laurie+Rubel

Awards Ceremony, The 18th Annual Faculty Day Conference, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/aca_facultyday/FD2014_AwardsCeremony.pdf

Laurie Rubel, LinkedIn, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurie-rubel-a3996b49/

Laurie Rubel, University of Haifa, Last accessed: June 25, 2022, https://lrubel.edu.haifa.ac.il/ 

Annie Selden (b. 1938)

Annie Selden (Annie Louise Laurer Alexander Selden) is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

Annie Selden received her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Oberlin College in 1959 and continued her study of mathematics in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship. She completed her masters degree at Yale University in 1962. She obtained her PhD from Clarkson University in 1974. After receiving her PhD, Selden spent the period from 1974 to 1985 teaching in Turkey and Nigeria. She taught at Tennessee Technical University from 1985 until her retirement in 2003.

Inspired by her international teaching experiences, Selden was one of the first to promote research in the teaching of undergraduate college mathematics. Since English was not the first language of many of her students, it caused her to think more deeply about the best teaching practices in college mathematics classrooms. Selden was awarded the AWM Louise Hay Award in 2002 for her work on Calculus reform and new ideas in the teaching of proofs in advanced mathematical coursework, as well as for her leadership in co-creating the Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME) special interest group of the MAA.

In addition to her contributions to the research of teaching in the college classroom, Selden made significant contributions both as an editor and to the editorial boards of journals dedicated to mathematics education. Over the years, she has been an editor for CBMS volumes, the College Math Journal’s Media Highlights section, MAA Online (Teaching and Learning), and FOCUS/MAA Online. Selden has served on the editorial boards for the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics, and the Journal of Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education.

Notably, she was one of the small group of women to initially propose the creation of the Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM) at a meeting of the AMS in 1971 to specifically provide a community of support for women doing research in mathematics. In 2003, Selden was elected as an AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Fellow. She and her husband John Selden established the MAA Annie and John Selden Prize for Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education in 2004.

From the honoree: “In February 2017, together with my husband, John Selden, I received the first ever Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Service presented by SIGMAA on RUME. Also, in 2015, our joint RUME Conference Proceedings paper, “A Perspective for University Students’ Proof Construction,” was awarded a meritorious citation. In progress is a book edited by Keith Weber and Milos Savic, tentatively titled, New Directions in University Proving: Honoring the Legacy of John and Annie Selden, for which I have written a chapter titled, “My Take: Proof Research at the Undergraduate Level–How it Has Evolved”.”

References

https://web.archive.org/web/20171107031943/http://www.awm-math.org/articles/notices/199107/blum/node2.html#SECTION02010000000000000000

https://books.google.com/books?id=FKK9yXRMNy8C&pg=PA131#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://awm-math.org/awards/hay-award/hay-award-2002/

http://sofia.nmsu.edu/~seldens/ASCV09e.pdf

https://sites.oxy.edu/lengyel/tracksplus/actuarial_changes/vitae.html#emp

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6984-5162

Sylvia Serfaty (b. 1975)

Sylvia Serfaty is featured for her contributions to research mathematics.

Born and raised in Paris, Sylvia Serfaty became interested in mathematics by persisting with a challenging problem in high school and finding a creative solution. After finishing her undergraduate and MSc degrees at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, she completed her PhD at the Université Paris-Sud (1999). Serfarty is currently a Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, having previously worked in Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris 6, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Ecole Normale Superieure of Cachan.

Serfaty’s research involves partial differential equations and mathematical physics. Her dissertation concerned the Ginzburg-Landau equations for fixed time, and much of her later research has extended this work to how aspects of the Ginzburg-Landau equations evolve over time.

Serfaty won the European Mathematical Society (EMS) Prize for her contributions to the Ginzburg-Landau theory (2004), the Henri Poincaré Prize (2012), the Grand prix Mergier-Bourdeix de l’Académie des Sciences de Paris (2013), and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. She also delivered one of the Plenary talks at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.

References

https://www.quantamagazine.org/sylvia-serfaty-on-mathematical-truth-and-frustration-20170221/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Serfaty

https://math.nyu.edu/~serfaty/

https://math.nyu.edu/~serfaty/students.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1csbILFCpY

Mei-Chi Shaw (b. 1955)

Mei-Chi Shaw is featured for her contributions to research mathematics.

Mei-Chi Shaw was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, after her family emigrated from mainland China in the period right after the 1927–1949 Chinese civil war. Having shown outstanding academic performance in school, Shaw earned admission to National Taiwan University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1977. She earned her MS and PhD (1981) from Princeton University. Shaw is currently a professor at the University of Notre Dame after previous positions at Purdue University, Texas A&M University, the University of Houston, and various visiting professor positions in the US and Europe.

Shaw’s mathematics research interests are in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and complex geometry. One of her first important mathematical contributions extended the results of Hörmander on Cauchy-Riemann equations to tangential Cauchy-Riemann equations. Shaw has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications. She has also held editorial positions for journals including the Proceedings of American Mathematical Society, the Journal of Geometric Analysis, and Complex Analysis and its Synergies. Shaw has received consistent grant support from the NSF since 1984.

Shaw has served on various committees and panels for the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the National Science Foundation, and the Association for Women in Mathematics. Also, she has organized multiple national and international conferences and been an invited speaker at research conferences across the globe. Shaw has co-authored an important graduate textbook, Partial Differential Equations in Several Complex Variables.

Shaw was named a fellow of the AMS in its 2013 inaugural class. In 2019, she won the Bergman Prize from the AMS for her lifelong contribution to several complex variables, partial differential equations, and Cauchy-Riemann geometry. Shaw was only the second woman to receive this honor since the prize’s inception in 1989. The 2022 Midwest Several Complex Variables Conference was held in her honor.

References

A Woman Mathematician’s Journey http://sites.nd.edu/meichi/files/2017/10/JourneyArticle.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mei-Chi_Shaw 

http://sites.nd.edu/meichi/

University of Notre Dame, College of Science, announcement of Bergman Prize awarded to Mei-Chi Shaw https://science.nd.edu/news/prestigious-bergman-prize-awarded-to-mei-chi-shaw-professor-of-mathematics/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mei-Chi_Shaw

CV:  http://sites.nd.edu/meichi/files/2022/02/ShawCV2022.pdf

Suzanne Sindi (b. 1970s)

Suzanne Soraya Sindi is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Suzanne Sindi’s parents were immigrants from Saudi Arabia and Portugal and she grew up in California. Sindi earned a BA in mathematics from California State University, Fullerton (2001). She completed her PhD at the University of Maryland, College Park (2006) and did postdoctoral work at Brown University (2006–2012). Sindi then joined the University of California, Merced (UC Merced) faculty, where she currently holds the rank of professor and is the Chair of Applied Mathematics.

Sindi’s primary research interests lie in mathematical biology, specifically, the use of mathematical models to gain insight into biological systems such as protein aggregation disease and blood coagulation. Over the years, her work has been funded by multiple grants from the NSF, the NIH, and the Army Office of Scientific Research. One such grant is the Joint DMS/NIGMS Initiative to Support Research at the Interface of the Biological and Mathematical Sciences (2017–2021), which is a highly prestigious R01 NIH grant. She advised or co-advised 8 PhD students who finished in the last 4 years, and currently is advising/co-advising 9 PhD students. Approximately half of these students are from groups underrepresented in mathematics.

Sindi is passionate about supporting under-represented minorities and women in science education. She is one of the founders of W-STEM, a mentoring and advocacy program for women in STEM fields at UC Merced. Sindi also organizes Association for Women in Mathematics workshops at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, promotes professional development at the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), and is a Math Alliance mentor.

References

https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=140153 

https://grantome.com/search?q=@author%20%20Suzanne%20Sindi  

Suzanne Sindi. The National Alliance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Sciences, 2022  https://mathalliance.org/

Cracking the (bio)code. Suzanne Sindi, PhD, 2014 Professional Development Session, The Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), October 17, 2014. https://crackingthebiocode.github.io/profiles/sindi-profile.html 

Suzanne Sindi, SindiLab, April 25, 2022. https://www.sindilab.com 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyHLtaEYE3w&feature=youtu.be 

https://compbio.cs.brown.edu/people/ 

Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780–1872)

Mary Fairfax Somerville is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

The first person to be described in print as a ‘scientist,’ Mary Fairfax Somerville was born in Scotland in 1780. She became interested in mathematics when listening to her brother’s geometry lessons; she was able to supply the answers when he couldn’t. Her education was haphazard, but included short-term tutors on geography and navigation, astronomy, Latin, dancing, and landscape painting.

Largely self-taught in mathematics through reading works by Euclid, Newton, and others, Somerville began submitting solutions to problems in the mathematical journal of the Military College at Marlow. She gained some fame when she won a silver medal in 1811 for a particularly clever solution to a problem in diophantine equations. Somerville was known to be generous with sharing knowledge she had acquired, and served as a mathematics tutor to Ada Lovelace, who is often called the first computer programmer.

In 1831 Somerville published The Mechanism of the Heavens, a work that began as a translation of Laplace’s work on celestial mechanics and developed into an expanded version with many original contributions. The book brought her international acclaim and was a standard university textbook for decades. Later books included On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834) and Physical Geography (1848), each of which had considerable international impact.

Along with Caroline Herschel, Somerville was one of the first two female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society (1835). She was the first woman to have a paper read to the Royal Society, and she won the Royal Geographical Society’s Patron Medal (1869). Late in her life, she was elected to the American Geographical and Statistical Society (1857) and the Italian Geographical Society (1870).

References

Mary Somerville  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville

MacPherson, Hamish (3 January 2019). “Back in the Day: The Queen of Science behind Scotland’s £10 note”. The National. Retrieved 22 November 2021.

Mary T. Brück, “Mary Somerville, Mathematician and Astronomer of Underused Talents”, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, vol.106, no.4, pp. 201–206.

The Royal Society, “Most influential women in British science history”. https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/diversity-in-science/influential-british-women-science/ , (Accessed 7/17/2022)

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Somerville 

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Somerville/ 

T. Christine Stevens (b. 1948)

T. Christine Stevens is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; mathematics education and establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities.

T. Christine Stevens earned her BA from Smith College (1970) and PhD in mathematics from Harvard University (1978). In addition to early-career faculty positions at institutions such as Mount Holyoke College and Arkansas State University, Stevens worked in government. She was the AMS/MAA/SIAM Congressional Fellow (1984–1985) and advised New York Congressman Ted Weiss on topics in science, technology, defense, and education. Stevens was also a National Science Foundation program officer for pre-college and undergraduate mathematics education from 1987 to 1989. She then joined the faculty of Saint Louis University (SLU), where she was a professor of mathematics and computer science for twenty-five years. After retiring from SLU, she became Associate Executive Director for Meetings and Professional Services of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2014–2021) and perhaps has now actually retired.

Stevens’s research contributions are in the theory of topological groups and the history of mathematics. In 2014 she was a Fulbright Senior Researcher at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Stevens has continued to publish in topological groups past her official retirement.

In 1994, Stevens co-founded Mathematical Association of America’s (MAA) Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching) together with Jim Leitzel and co-directed the program through 1998. She was Director of Project NExT until 2009. From its inception, Project NExT has provided mentorship and networking opportunities for new and recent PhD graduates in the mathematical sciences, and the program continues to be impactful both for participants and the profession.

Stevens has been honored with the MAA Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics (1997), the MAA Gung and Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics (2004), the Smith College Medal (2010), and the AWM’s (Association for Women in Mathematics) Louise Hay Award (2015). She was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005) and an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2013).

References

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Stevens_(mathematician)

Project NExT: https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/professional-development/project-next

MAA Interview (Biography): https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/centennial/2010ChrisStevensInterview.pdf

Smith College Medal: https://www.smith.edu/newsoffice/releases/NewsOffice09-044.html

AMS: https://www.ams.org/notices/201501/rnoti-p56.pdf

Chuu-Lian Terng (b. 1949)

Chuu-Lian Terng is featured for her contributions to research mathematics; establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Chuu-Lian Terng received her BS from National Taiwan University in 1971 and her PhD from Brandeis University in 1976. She spent most of her career at Northeastern University and the University of California at Irvine, where she is currently Professor Emerita.

Her research interests include submanifold geometry and integrable PDEs. She is the author of several books and over 60 research papers. Her Critical Point Theory and Submanifold Geometry (co-authored with Richard S. Palais) went through 38 editions between 1987 and 2006, and was published in three languages.

Terng has been active in the Association for Women in Mathematics throughout her career, chairing several committees and serving as its president (1995–1997). She has been a member of multiple prominent editorial boards, including the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. Her other leadership roles include positions on the Advisory Board of the National Center for Theoretical Sciences in Taiwan and the Steering Committee of the Institute for Advanced Study Park City Summer Institute.

Terng was part of the inaugural classes of Fellows both of the AMS (2013) and of the AWM (2018). Her numerous awards and recognitions include a Sloan Fellowship (1980), a Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1996), and invited lectures at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (1984, 1999, 2011) and the International Congress of Mathematicians (2006).

References

Chuu-Lian Terng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuu-Lian_Terng (accessed July 7 2022)

Wolrdcat identities (https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n88106827/), (accessed July 7 2022).

Past Members, Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences   https://www.pims.math.ca/pims-glance/scientific-review-panel/past-members (accessed July 17 2022) 

https://www.ams.org/cgi-bin/fellows/fellows.cgi#t

https://www.spectroom.com/102988312-chuu-lian-terng

Mariel Vázquez Melken (b. 1971)

Mariel Vázquez Melken is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Mariel Vázquez was born in Mexico City, Mexico. She attended Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) where she earned a BS in mathematics in 1994. During college she discovered that she could pursue her passions for both mathematics and molecular biology by studying knots and DNA. She continued her studies at Florida State University, earning a PhD in mathematical biology in 2000.

Post-graduation, Vázquez held faculty positions at University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. In 2014 she joined the faculty of University of California, Davis. She currently holds the rank of professor there with joint appointments in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. In 2019 she became faculty director of the UC Davis Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS).

Vázquez is known for her work in the field of DNA topology, applying topological tools to the study of DNA. Her research includes studying the packing of chromosomes and the mechanisms of proteins interacting with the topology of DNA. She is also interested in analyzing cancer genomic data and studying the evolution and dynamics of coronaviruses.

Vázquez has received numerous awards recognizing her innovative research, dedication to mentoring, and commitment to equity in STEM. These include an NSF CAREER Award (2011), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2012), and the Mohammed Dahleh Distinguished Lectureship Award (2014). In 2016, Vázquez was the recipient of the Blackwell Tapia Prize. She has also been named in the inaugural class of fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics (2018) and as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2020).

References

Vázquez, M. (2021). Dr. Mariel Vázquez Melken. In P. E. Harries, et al. (Eds.), Testimonios: Stories of Latinx and Hispanic Mathematicians (pp. 249–258). American Mathematical Society. https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/pubs/books/members/Testimonios.pdf

Alumni Profile: Mariel Vázquez, PhD: Math Department Alum Wins Major NSF Award. Department of Mathematics, Florida State University. https://math.fsu.edu/DepartmentNews/Articles/Alum_Vazquez.math

Personal Profile of Prof. Mariel Vázquez. Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. https://www.msri.org/people/11936

Mariel Vázquez. College of Biological Sciences, University of California, Davis. https://biology.ucdavis.edu/people/mariel-vazquez

Mariel Vázquez. University of California, Davis. https://ucd-advance.ucdavis.edu/mariel-vazquez

2018 Inaugural Class of AWM Fellows. Association for Women in Mathematics. https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2018-awm-fellows/

List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. The American Mathematical Society. https://www.ams.org/cgi-bin/fellows/fellows.cgi

Maria Cristina Villalobos (b. 1971)

Maria Cristina Villalobos is featured for her contributions to increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Maria Cristina Villalobos earned her BS in Mathematics from the University of Texas, Austin in 1994 and her PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University in 2000. She joined the University of Texas system that same year and is currently holds the Myles and Sylvia Aaronson Endowed Professorship and the is Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Institutional Effectiveness in the College of Sciences at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), close to her hometown of Donna, Texas. Her research foci include modeling optimization problems in diseases and antenna design, and STEM Education.

A first-generation college graduate, Villalobos is noted for her efforts to increase the numbers of underrepresented students in STEM. She founded the Center of Excellence in STEM Education at UTRGV in 2011. The Center serves over 4,000 K–12 students each year and works with undergraduate students to prepare them for STEM careers or graduate school. She served on the Board of Directors of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Additionally, she served as the initial (interim) Director of the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at UTRGV (2015–2017), increasing the number of women and Latino tenure-track faculty and developing the Ph.D. program in Mathematics and Statistics with Interdisciplinary Applications.

Her awards include a Great Minds in STEM Luminary Award (2012) and a UT Board of Regents’s Outstanding Teaching Award (2013). In 2016 she received the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Service/Teaching Award, and in 2019 she was awarded the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Sciences, and Diversifying Computing. In 2020 she was honored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring and received the Presidential Award for Service from SACNAS. She was also named a 2023 AMS (American Mathematical Society) Fellow for her contributions to modeling and optimization and for broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in mathematics.

References

Falk, Jeff. Rice Alumna Villalobos Earns White House Mentoring Award. Rice University News and Media Relations. 6 August 2020. https://news.rice.edu/news/2020/rice-alumna-villalobos-earns-white-house-mentoring-award (accessed 25 August 2022).

Kehoe, Elaine. 2020 Presidential Awards Announced. Notices of the AMS Vol. 67, No. 10 (November 2020), 1626. https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202010/rnoti-p1626.pdf (accessed 25 August 2022).

Maria Cristina Villalobos. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Cristina_Villalobos (accessed 25 August 2022).

National Science Foundation. Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring: Maria Cristina Villalobos. https://paesmem.net/paesmemRecognition/awardeeProfile/1178 (accessed 25 August 2022).

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Faculty Profile: Maria Cristina Villalobos. https://webapps.utrgv.edu/aa/dm/#/user/cristina.villalobos (accessed 25 August 2022).

The University of Texas System. Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Awards: Maria Cristina Villalobos. https://www.utsystem.edu/sites/regents-outstanding-teaching-awards/2013/villalobos-maria (accessed 25 August 2022).

UTRGV ADVANCE. Faculty Spotlight. The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. https://www.utrgv.edu/advance/people/faculty-spotlight/index.htm (accessed 25 August 2022).

Lauren Williams (b. 1978)

Lauren Williams is featured for her contributions to research mathematics.

A California native, Lauren Kiyomi Williams earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University (2000) and her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2005). She is currently the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard and the Sally Starling Seaver Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, having previously worked as a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (2009–2020), as a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard (2006–2009) and a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC, Berkeley (2005–2006).

Williams’s mathematical interests are in algebraic combinatorics, the use of abstract algebra to solve counting problems. One of her objects of study is the positive Grassmannian, a geometric object whose points represent “positive” k-dimensional planes in a real n-dimensional vector space.” Williams has shown that this shape is related to equations that describe physical objects as diverse as tsunami waves and particle collisions in quantum physics.

Williams has received many awards for her work, including the Association for Women in Mathematics Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory (2016), a Simons Fellowship (2014), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022). In addition, she was in the inaugural class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society (2013), and is only the second tenured woman mathematician in Harvard’s history. Williams was chosen to be an invited speaker at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians. She has published over 50 papers, including one where she and her co-author Yuji Kodama included a haiku summary of the paper: “Arrangements of stones // reveal patterns in the waves // as space-time expands”.

References

Wikipedia contributors, “Lauren Williams (mathematician),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lauren_Williams_(mathematician)&oldid=1096555043 (accessed July 14, 2022). 

Kevin Hartnett, “A Mathematician’s Unanticipated Journey Through the Physical World”, Quanta Magazine, December 16, 2020, https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-mathematicians-adventure-through-the-physical-world-20201216/ (accessed July 15, 2022).

Lauren Williams, “Curriculum Vitae”, https://people.math.harvard.edu/~williams/CV.pdf (accessed July 15, 2022).

Shelby Wilson (b. 1985)

Shelby Wilson is featured for her contributions to research mathematics and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

During college, Shelby Wilson had internships with NASA’s Flight Research and Space Flight Centers (2003, 2004). After completing BS degrees in mathematics and computer science at Spelman College (2006), Wilson earned a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2012.  She then completed a one-year postdoc at the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA).  After earning tenure in the mathematics department at Morehouse College, Wilson returned to Baltimore as an assistant professor of biology at the University of Maryland, College Park and now is Senior Professional Staff I at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. 

Wilson’s interdisciplinary research interests include modeling physical phenomena such as cancer growth and sleep dynamics using parameter estimation, dynamical systems, network theory, machine learning, and data science.  The list of research programs she has organized includes the Future Leaders in interdisciplinary Cancer Research (FLiiCR) Program (2016), the University of Maryland MAPS REU Project (Co-Leader Summer 2016), the MBI Women Advancing Mathematical Biology Workshop (2017), and the Summer Research for Women in Mathematics Program at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (2018). 

Wilson is a co-founder of the website Mathematically Gifted and Black, a space devoted to highlighting accomplishments and influences of Black mathematicians. She is a co-founder and a board member of CodeHouse, which focuses on cultivating a strong pipeline between Black/Latinx students and industry-leading technology companies.  Wilson also serves on the advisory board for the National Science Foundation grant: Studying Successful Doctoral Students in Mathematics from Underrepresented Groups. She has served as a panelist on issues of diversity at several national conferences, such as the SIAM Annual Meeting (2017, 2018) and the Joint Mathematics Meetings (2019, 2020). Wilson gave the 2019 Etta Falconer Mathematics Lecture at Spelman College.  She is currently a selection committee member for the Mathematically Gifted and Black and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (MGB-SIAM) Early Career (MSEC) Fellowship.  Wilson was named a 2023 Fellow of the AWM.

References

About Us.  Mathematically Gifted & Black. https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/about-us/

Shelby Wilson, Black History Month 2022 Honoree, Mathematically Gifted & Black https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/shelby-wilson/

Shelby N Wilson, Mathematics Genealogy Project.  Department of Mathematics, North Dakota State University, July 19, 2022. https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=165998

Shelby Wilson, PhD, Vita. https://shelby-wilson.com/SWilson_CV_Feb2020.pdf

Shelby Wilson’s website https://shelby-wilson.com/index.html

Etta Z. Falconer Lecture Series, Spellman College, 2019 https://www.spelman.edu/academics/majors-and-programs/mathematics/falconer-lecture-series

CodeHouse website.  Main page.  July 20, 2022. https://www.thecodehouse.org/

Board of Directors, CodeHouse website.  July 20, 2022. https://www.thecodehouse.org/our-team

MGB-SIAM Early Career Fellowship, SIAM.  July 20, 2022. https://www.siam.org/students-education/programs-initiatives/mgb-siam-early-career-fellowship 

Ulrica Wilson (b. 1970s)

Ulrica Wilson is featured for her contributions to establishing, cultivating and sustaining mathematical communities and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

Ulrica Wilson obtained her PhD from Emory University in 2004, after receiving a BS at Spelman College and an MS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics at Morehouse College.

Mentorship of future generations of women mathematicians plays a central role in Wilson’s career. For eight years, she was a Co-Director of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Program. She is currently the Vice-President of the EDGE Foundation, which supports this program. 

Wilson served as the Vice President of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) in 2018, and  is a leader in supporting underrepresented groups in mathematics. She is currently the Associate Director of Diversity and Outreach at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), where she works to ensure diversity throughout ICERM’s programs and activities. Another high-impact mentoring program of which Wilson is currently an organizer is Research Experiences for Undergraduate Faculty (REUF), which encourages and supports involvement in research with undergraduates by faculty at universities that emphasize undergraduate education, especially from institutions that serve large numbers of underrepresented minority students. The REUF is hosted by ICERM and AIM (American Institute of Mathematics).

Wilson was the 2016–2017 winner of the Morehouse College Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award. In 2018, she was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the highest national mentoring award bestowed by the White House. In 2019 she was named a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). Wilson was presented the 2023 Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics from the American Mathematical Society. 

References

Ulrica Wilson, Mathematically Gifted and Black, Circle of Excellence (last accessed June 19, 2022). https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/ulrica-wilson/ 

Dr. Ulrica Wilson Phd., Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (last accessed June 19, 2022). https://www.mathad.com/profile?gdcd2518074595224146788cgfg 

Morehouse Professors Win White House/National Science Foundation Awards, by Delia Carter, Morehouse College, released July 2, 2018, recovered through Wayback Machine (last accessed June 19, 2022) https://web.archive.org/web/20181008022738/http://www.morehouse.edu/newscenter/morehouseprofessorswinwhitehousenationalsciencefoundationawards.html

2019 Class of AWM Fellows, Association for Women in Mathematics (last accessed June 19, 2022).  https://awm-math.org/awards/awm-fellows/2019-awm-fellows/ 

Diversity @ICERM (last accessed June 19, 2022) https://icerm.brown.edu/about/diversity/

EDGE Foundation (last accessed June 19, 2022) https://www.edgeforwomen.org/support-edge/the-edge-foundation/ 

The NAM Board of Directors, National Association of Mathematicians Newsletter, vol. XVIII number 4 (2018), p. 12 

Research Experiences for Undergraduate Faculty – REUF (last accessed June 19, 2022) http://reuf.aimath.org/ 

https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=7130 

Lucía Zapata Cardona (b. 1970s)

Lucía Zapata Cardona is featured for her contributions to mathematics education.

Lucía Zapata Cardona obtained her PhD in mathematics education from the University of Georgia in 2008. She is currently a full professor at the University of Antioquia, Colombia, the same university where she completed her undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics. She is also an active member of the Group of Education in Experimental Sciences and Mathematics (GECEM) research collaborative at the University of Antioquia.

Cardona’s areas of research are statistics education, teacher education, and the professional development of mathematics teachers. In collaboration with Andreas Eichler, she published the 2016 book Empirical research in statistics education. Cardona has also published numerous articles and book chapters that reflect the scope of her research interests. Two examples are the article “Students construction and use of statistical models: a socio-critical perspective” in the International Journal on Mathematics Education (2018) and, with Luis Miguel Marrugo Escobar, the book chapter “Critical citizenship in Colombian statistics textbooks,” published in Springer’s Topics and trends in current statistics education research (2019).

Cardona has won many awards and honors during her career. In 1999, she won best educator at Instituto Educacional Zoraida Trujillo and, in 2003, she was named best educator at Institucion Educativa Fé y Alegría Limonar. In March of 2009, she won an honorable mention status in the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) Dissertation Competition.

References

CVLAC – RG – Scienti.minciencias.gov.co. https://scienti.minciencias.gov.co/cvlac/visualizador/generarCurriculoCv.do?cod_rh=0000430781  Accessed 18 Jun. 2022.

Doctorado Interinstitucional en Educación – UDFJC. “Lucía Zapata Cardona.” Doctorado Interinstitucional En Educación – UDFJC, Doctorado Interinstitucional En Educación – UDFJC, 3 Aug. 2021, https://die.udistrital.edu.co/comunidad/lucia_zapata_cardona. Accessed 18 Jun. 2022.

https://repensarlasmatematicas.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/lucia-zapata.pdf 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10986065.2021.1922859

María del Rosario Zavala (b. 1980s)

María del Rosario Zavala is featured for her contributions to mathematics education and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented groups.

María del Rosario Zavala obtained a PhD in Mathematics Education from the University of Washington (2012) after earning a BA in Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an Associate Professor of Elementary Education at San Francisco State University, where her responsibilities include teaching in the multiple subject credential program for future elementary school teachers, the Spanish-bilingual program, and in the doctoral program for Educational Leadership.

Zavala’s research focuses on equity issues in mathematics education, specifically identity development and culturally responsive practices in the math education of Latinxs and other historically marginalized populations. Her research interests include how to support the development of productive mathematics identities and challenge stereotypes of who should do math, and exploring how Latinx students draw on racialized narratives of mathematics achievement to make sense of their own successes and challenges in learning mathematics. She is also interested in understanding how new teachers develop competencies in culturally responsive mathematics teaching, especially those who teach in Spanish bilingual settings.

Zavala served on the board of directors of TODOS Mathematics for ALL! (2021–2022), an international professional organization that advocates for equity and excellence in mathematics education for all students, and in particular for Latinx students. She hosts the podcast TODOS Mathematics for ALL!, where she holds conversations with educators committed to the mission and vision of TODOS.

Zavala is also active as a member of the Equity Committee in the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, and is an officer of the Special Interest Group in Research in Mathematics Education of the American Education Research Association.

In 2019 she was featured in Lathisms, a website that showcases the contributions of Latinx and Hispanic mathematicians.

References

María Zavala. San Francisco State University, Graduate College of Education. (Last accessed on July 9, 2022). https://gcoe.sfsu.edu/maria-zavala 

María del Rosario Zavala. Lathisms, 2019. (Last accessed on July 9, 2022). https://www.lathisms.org/calendar-2019/maria-del-rosario-zavala 

Dr. María del Rosario Zavala. Open up resources. (Last accessed on July 9, 2022).  https://openupresources.org/about-us/dr-maria-del-rosario-zavala/ 

TODOS: Mathematics for ALL, Excellence and Equity in Mathematics, Podcast. (Last accessed on July 9, 2022). https://www.todos-math.org/todos-podcasts