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Mathematical Sciences Graduate Student Achievement and Impact 

This year has been marked by outstanding accomplishments across our graduate student community. From awards to international research presentations, our students continue to demonstrate excellence in scholarship, teaching, and outreach. Here's a look at some of the highlights: 

Allison Kohne was awarded both a 2026 T.C. Lim Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2026 Dean's Excellence in Teaching Award. She will be attending the SL Math summer school "Singularities in Commutative Algebra Through Cohomological Methods" in July 2026. She will also attend the PASCA 2.0 (Pan-American School in Commutative Algebra) summer school at CIMPA in Guanajuato, Mexico, where she will be presenting a poster.    She served as the first president of restarted student AWM chapter, which has hosted regular events, including a very successful career panel. 

Anthony Pizzimenti won the 2026 Clarke Family Award for Research Excellence in Topology. He just entered his second year of an  NSF GRFP. He has two forthcoming publications:  one with Mike Jarret,  and "Generalized cluster algorithms for Potts Lattice Gauge Theory" with Ben Schweinhart and Paul Duncan on the arxiv.  He gave talks at CAGS, IMSI, SESAPS, JMM,  will give an upcoming  invited talk at FoCS,  and another at the AMS Sectional. 

Anunoy Chakraborty has written two papers and is working on his third.

Elisha Erzoah gave a presentation at Biomathematics & Ecology Education & Research (BEER)- 2025 Symposium on the topic "Data-Driven Modeling of Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase(MAPK) Dynamics."

Ethan Clelland is finishing up a paper with Michael Merkle and Casey Blacker related to simplicial Lie groups and hopes to have our preprint out soon. He will be visiting MPIM. 

Felipe Perez gave a series of lectures on Calculus of Variations and Optimization at  Georgetown University in Fall 2025. He gave a contributed talk at Finite Element Circus Conference (Fall 2025), and gave a talk and a poster at both IMSI, Chicago in October 2025 and at ICERM in April 2026.

James Johnson won a summer internship at the US Naval Research Lab for the Summer 2026. 

Jeanie Schreiber received the 2026 CMAI Graduate Award for Excellence in Research. She  has one paper published and one in revisions with another close to submission.

John Kent received a 2026 Summer Research Assistantship via the Provost's office.

Maddy Sherwood received a 2026 Summer Research Assistantship via the Provost's office. 

Mazen Althobaiti delivered two research presentations:  at BEER-Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research 2025, and at JMM 2026. 

Morgan Shuman has completed the draft of a paper which will soon be submitted for publication. 

Nathaniel Fink-Humes is the department's GAPSA representative for the 2025-26 year. He presented on research in the Analysis Seminar and at JMM.  He has completed a draft of a paper, soon to be submitted.

Pier-Olivia Rodrigue received a 2026 T.C. Lim Award for Excellence in Teaching. 

Shrunal Pothagoni was awarded both the 2026 Mathematics Graduate Research Excellence Award and the 2026 Dean's Award for Excellence in Research. He wrote a grant proposal while attending a workshop at the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology. As a result, he opened new collaborations in molecular biology, expanding his research program. He will attending Foundations in Computational Mathematics in Vienna this summer to give a poster presentation. He had a paper accepted for publication last month and expects to have at least two more manuscripts completed by the end of the year.

Sky Ratcliffe worked on a numerical proof that for large regions of the (chi,sigma)- parameter plane there exist pulled fronts with speed c=2, agreeing with the classic Fisher-KPP model, for a Keller-Segel model (chemotaxis, chemoattractant case), and so far has had great results with values of sigma giving way to resonance which has never been explored for this system before. 

Summer Chenoweth submitted the paper "Dynamics of perturbed elliptical billiards tables," in February 2026, along with Emmanuel Fleurantin, Jay Mireles James (FAU), and Evelyn Sander.

Yaw Owusu-Agyemang had a summer internship at Sandia National Lab and has published a paper in Sandia's Internship Proceedings. He presented poster in the IMSI Workshop: Optimal Control and Decision Making Under Uncertainty for Digital Twins in October 2025 and a poster and talk at the ICERM Workshop: Simulation-Based Optimization with Applications in April 2026. He won a summer internship at Wells Fargo Bank for Summer 2026.

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