This learning community is for everyone, from those who are already experienced in community engagement to those who are curious about learning more about this high-impact educational practice. Faculty participants will discuss readings, meet with outside speakers, share ideas, and think collaboratively about implementing community engagement into the 5C students’ experience.

Mayleen Cortez-Rodriguez, a finalist for a tenure-track faculty position in the Department of Mathematics, will deliver the lecture”Estimating Causal Effects in the Presence of Interference with No Network Knowledge”

Abstract

Do phone call reminders to vote increase voter turnout? Does a vaccine decrease disease rates? The answers to causal questions like these can inform public policy decisions and public health strategies. A broad goal of causal inference, the field that studies causality, is to quantify the causal effect of a treatment (e.g. phone call or vaccine) on an outcome (e.g. voter turnout or disease rate) to answer a causal question of interest. Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) are considered the “gold standard” for estimating causal effects because they satisfy an important independence assumption about the treatment. However, even RCTs can be subject to interference, where the treatment of one individual can affect the outcome of another (e.g., vaccines and herd immunity). Many approaches to addressing interference have arisen in the last decade and most begin by modeling the interference as a network. However, the majority of these approaches require full knowledge of the underlying network, which is a problem in many practical settings where such information is unavailable. Thus, to address this critical gap, Cortez-Rodriguez presents an approach that achieves unbiased estimates of causal effects without requiring fine-grain knowledge of the underlying interference network. Then, she presents a way to incorporate two different types of network information to improve performance. Cortez-Rodriguez concludes with some promising directions for future work.

Welcome to HMC’s Community Conversations for the fall 2025.

HMC Community Conversations* use conversation guides with a structured format to help people with different viewpoints and experiences build understanding. There will be 3–5 other people in a table group. It is not a debate, and the goal is not to change one another’s opinions. There are Conversation Agreements like “Listen and Be Curious” and “Show Respect and Suspend Judgement” that create the framework for diving into the questions. The questions are designed to draw out our personal experiences rather than opinions around the topic.

The overall purpose is to learn more about the experiences others have around the topic and build a sense of community. Each gathering will be on a separate topic. Gatherings will be in person only.

Advance RSVP with HR required.

Chrysafis Vogiatzis, a finalist for a tenure-track faculty position in the Department of Mathematics, will deliver the lecture

“From nodal to group centrality and beyond: An overview of the state-of-the-art and future directions”

Abstract

Centrality is probably the most well-studied network analysis metric out there. Over the years, centrality has been used as a proxy of importance in settings as diverse as transportation, biological, and social networks. In the last decade, we are observing a move away from nodal metrics, which assign importance to a node alone, and towards group metrics, which consider collections of nodes. It is often desirable for these groups to induce specific structures or motifs, depending on the application or context. Chrysafis Vogiatzis will present an overview of the state-of-the-art and its fast evolution within the operations research and network optimization communities. Then, Vogiatzis will talk about future exciting directions, including the limited availability of stochastic metrics, new structures and emerging applications that can take advantage of the proposed metrics. Vogiatzis will finish this presentation with his contributions to stochastic variants of group centrality with an application to protein-protein interaction networks.

Celebrate 70 Years
Enjoy an afternoon of connection, creativity and community!

Raise a Mudder Mocktail, groove to music of the 70’s, get crafty with the makerspace stewards, snap fun photos, score some limited-edition swag and enjoy a slice of the anniversary cake. President Nembhard and fellow community members will share reflections and hopes for the decades ahead, and we’ll explore the Mudd Moments Mosaic—a vibrant collection of photos capturing the memories and milestones that define the Harvey Mudd experience.

This event is open to the Harvey Mudd College campus community.

Learn about HMC’s approved study abroad programs and how to study abroad your junior year.

“We don’t want to live in a society in turmoil. In the US, 93 percent of people want to reduce divisiveness, and 86 percent believe it’s possible to disagree in a healthy way. Yet with increasing political and social fragmentation, many of us don’t know how to move past our differences. Civil rights scholar john a. powell presents an actionable path through “bridging” that helps us communicate, coexist, and imagine a new story for our shared future where we all belong.” (taken from Othering and Belonging Institute)

The Office of Civic & Community Engagement (OCCE) will be hosting a guilt-free book club this fall semester on john a. powell’s book The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong. Our first gathering is on Friday, October 3rd.

Celebrate the holiday season with colleagues.

This learning community is for everyone, from those who are already experienced in community engagement to those who are curious about learning more about this high-impact educational practice. Faculty participants will discuss readings, meet with outside speakers, share ideas, and think collaboratively about implementing community engagement into the 5C students’ experience.