On November 7th, DePaul hosted its 23rd Annual Undergraduate STEM Research Showcase. At the showcase, DePaul students communicated their research findings with the scientific community through poster presentations and research talks. Several Mathematical Sciences students presented their work, including:

Oral Presentations

• Umid Ahmadali, The Six-Vertex Model with Partial Domain Wall Boundary Conditions (pDWBC) and the Probability Distribution of the Type-C Vertex in the Final Row
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Karl Liechty
• Umid Ahmadali, Non-Distributive Intervals on the Type-B Tamari Lattice
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Emily Barnard
• Owen Levens, Polynomials Arising from Sorted Binomial Coefficients
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Allan Berele
• Nicolas Oses Frola, The Effectiveness of a Size-Based Recognition Model on Motif Identification and Characterization
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Shaun Mahoney, Penn State University

Poster Presentations

• Clara Campos de Araujo, The Dirichlet Eigenvalue Problem on Grid Domains 
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. David Sher
  Work supported by the Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program (URAP)
• Michael Czaplinski, A Tale of Knots with Many Twists and Turns
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Enrico Au-Yeung
• Joosung Lee, Who Can Win in a Game of Knots?  
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Enrico Au-Yeung
• Owen Levens, Pascalian Root Asymptotics 
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Allan Berele
  Work supported by the Undergraduate Summer Research Program (USRP)
• Jiahui Li, L-splines-of-order-4-algorithm
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Enrico Au-Yeung
• Vu Phan, Expected Number of Turns to Complete a Generalized (m,n) Bingo Game 
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Ilie Ugarcovici
• Grant Williams, Can ChatGPT Help Undergraduates Solve Graduate Level Abstract Geometry Problems?  
  Faculty Advisor: Dr. Enrico Au-Yeung

The showcase also featured a plenary talk by 2011 DePaul Math alumna Dr. Joelle Mbatchou. After graduating from DePaul in 2011, Dr. Mbatchou went on to earn Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Chicago.  In Dr. Mbatchou’s current role as a Senior Statistical Geneticist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals,  she works on the development of statistical methods and computational tools for large-scale data sets. You can read more about her work here.

Several students from the DePaul mathematics community spent their summers engaging in full-time mathematical research. Some students conducted research with DePaul faculty as part of the Undergraduate Summer Research Program, while others conducted research at external institutions.  Regardless of location, students learned to ask and answer their own questions, and even proved things that had never been proven before! So cool!

At the end of the summer, the following students came together and presented their work at the 2024 Mathematical Sciences Summer Research Showcase:

• Rose Bittle, Modifications to the Spiral Array
• Clara Campos, Optimal Transportation on Histograms (Research mentor: Dr. Enrico Au-Yeung)
• Erik Dahlen, The Imbalance of a vector in a d-dimensional hypercube and the Eulerian numbers (Research mentor: Dr. T. Kyle Petersen)
• Joosung Lee, Imbalance and Eulerian numbers (Research mentor: Dr. T. Kyle Petersen)
• Owen Levens, Bijection, Collaboration, and Perseverance in Global Pattern Avoidance (Research mentor: Dr. Bridget Tenner)
• Blair Johnson, Odd-Even Transposition Sort (Research mentor: Dr. T. Kyle Petersen)
• Nicholas Oses Frola, Finding Frobenius Symmetry for Four Element Sets (Research mentor: Dr. David Sher)
• Olivia Medina, 2D Conical Radon Transform used in Medical Imaging (Research mentor: Dr. Enrico Au-Yeung)

Abstracts for the student talks can be found here: 2024 Summer Research Showcase Abstracts

Interested in learning more about these students’ experiences? Keep an eye out for upcoming DePaul Math Club talks! 

Are you interested in conducting mathematical research? (Great!) You can start by talking to the faculty members you know or by reaching out to the MAT department’s undergraduate research coordinator, Dr. Emily Barnard (e.barnard@depaul.edu).