May 26, 2009 - Claremont, Calif. -
The five-year $800,000 NSF grant will underwrite a new Department of Mathematics program, “Optimizing the Mathematics Postdoctoral Experience: A Teaching and Research Postdoctoral Fellowship,” which will establish a new postdoctoral fellowship focused on the synergistic activities of teaching and research as well as connections between the two.
Over the five years, the program will support five postdoctoral fellows and 10 undergraduate summer research associates. Each fellow will spend two years at HMC and develop their research under the guidance of a research mentor. They will also teach an average of one course per semester in tandem with a teaching mentor, supervise a summer research student, advise a capstone research experience such as a senior thesis or one of Harvey Mudd College’s industrial research-based Clinics, and participate in outreach activities and other vital departmental functions.
Professors Andrew Bernoff, Jon Jacobsen and Rachel Levy are principal investigators on the grant.
“Harvey Mudd College is a recognized leader in the teaching of undergraduate mathematics and mentoring of undergraduate research,” said Bernoff. “This grant will allow us to train recent Ph.D.s to excel as faculty members at undergraduate institutions.”
The grant also provides funds for HMC undergraduates over the summer. “Our plan is to team up the postdoctoral fellows with HMC faculty members and undergraduates over the summer to create small research groups,” said Bernoff. “We are all very excited to welcome these fellows to the HMC family.”
In 2006, the American Mathematical Society recognized the department with its inaugural Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department award, citing the department’s leadership and innovation in undergraduate teaching, mentoring undergraduate research and outreach to the broader community.
The HMC Department of Mathematics is a leader in outreach activities, including the Pathways Program founded by professors Jacobsen and Michael Orrison, which facilitates visits from professional mathematicians to elementary, junior high and high school classrooms; the L.A. Professional Development and Outreach Group run by Professor Darryl Yong, which provides networking and support for secondary school teachers in the Greater Los Angeles Area; and Math for America Los Angeles, where Yong and HMC President Maria Klawe serve as members of the executive steering committee.
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Dagan Karp is co-principal investigator on a $23,850 NSF grant to support the scientific symposium Categorical Methods in Topology and Quantum Geometry, which will take place at the National Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Chicano and Native Americans in the Sciences in Dallas, Texas, Oct. 15–18, 2009.
The funding will be used for student, speaker and organizer support for the workshop, which will disseminate knowledge to a wide and extraordinarily diverse audience, to provide the opportunity for scientists to interact and foster collaboration and new research, and to enable and encourage students and other scientists to pursue research in areas related to low dimensional topology and quantum geometry.
Theresa Lynn, assistant professor of physics, has been granted a Cottrell College Science Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement for her project entitled “Photon Pair Entanglement in Multiple Degrees of Freedom for Quantum Communication.”
The $41,718 grant will support her research in quantum communication, a field of physics that applies quantum mechanics and technology to the storage and transmission of information on microscopic-sized matter, such as individual photons, or quantum packets of light.
HMC students will participate in this research over the summer.
“The microscopic world provides better ways for us to protect and code information against hackers,” Lynn explained. “We have already shown that it’s possible to perform cryptograpy tasks using pairs of photons (particles of light). This research will allow us to push further in terms of information transmission by using different aspects of how pairs of photons work together. With technology for information storage continuing to get smaller and smaller, soon we will get to the point where we can store a bit of information on a single atom and are forced to worry about how quantum mechanics affects that storage.”
Funded by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, Cottrell College Science Awards support significant research that contributes to the advancement of science and to the professional and scholarly development of faculty at undergraduate institutions.
The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations have awarded HMC $250,000 for its recently-launched information technology (IT) upgrade.
The grant will be applied to classroom technology, ensuring that students and faculty can make use of current technologies and software to enrich learning across many disciplines.
This is the second grant to the college from the foundations to be awarded during the 2008-09 academic year, the first being a grant of $150,000 in support of HMC’s participation in Math for America Los Angeles.
“These funds will allow us to support faculty and students who wish to experiment with technology in teaching,” explained Joseph Vaughan, HMC’s chief information officer and vice president of computing and information services. “This experimentation will in turn inform how we set up the classes in HMC’s new building, allowing us to gain experiential knowledge of what works (or doesn’t work) in HMC classrooms.”
In the fall of 2008, the college embarked upon a comprehensive program of enhancement in its use of technology for teaching and research.
A $750,000 grant from the Fletcher Jones Foundation initially kicked off the IT upgrade.
Over the course of four years, the IT initiative will address campus network infrastructure, staff development in the Office of Computing and Information Services, and classroom and laboratory infrastructure.
Media contact: Don Davidson
don_davidson@hmc.edu
Office: (909) 607-7924 / Cell: (909) 936-8201
Copyright 2009 Harvey Mudd College