Campus Community
Posted: Thursday, November 5, 2009Math Scholarship Adds Up to $10K
Four Buffalo State students were each awarded a $10,000 URGE to Compute scholarship for 2010. Michael Jansma, Class of 2011; Michael Kourt, Class of 2011; Michelle Rua, Class of 2011; and Katie Sember, Class of 2012, joined eight undergraduates from the University at Buffalo at a luncheon held on Sunday, October 25.
The event, which also included poster presentations from the 2009 cohort of undergraduates in the program, was held at UB’s Center for Computational Research, part of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences in Buffalo. Thomas Furlani, ’80, ’82, director of the Center for Computational Research, took the students on a tour of the center.
The URGE to Compute program is a collaboration among Buffalo State, the University at Buffalo, the Center for Computational Research, and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. The program is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of NSF’s Computational Science Training for Undergraduates in the Mathematical Sciences program. CSUMS’ goal is to “better prepare…students to pursue careers in fields that require integrated strengths in computation and the mathematical sciences.” The mathematical sciences are mathematics and statistics.
Students accepted into the URGE to Compute program receive a $10,000 stipend while they take part in a yearlong computational math program that requires special seminars, 15 hours a week in collaborative research each semester, and an eight-week summer research program. Students agree not to have any other job while receiving the stipend.
Joaquin Carbonara, associate professor of mathematics, is the principal investigator at Buffalo State for the $181,943 funded program.
“This program gives students several opportunities,” said Carbonara. “One, they have the opportunity to work very closely under faculty mentors who are scholars in the discipline. Two, they each will belong to a research group of three or four students while still being part of, and interacting regularly with, the larger cohort of 12 UB and Buffalo State students, so they will have both collaborators and peer support. And three, the stipend allows them to dedicate themselves to this opportunity.”
Members of the 2010 cohort will work on one of four projects, each of which is related to this year’s theme, “computational discrete mathematics.” This year, Carbonara and Valentin Brimkov, professor of mathematics and a world-renowned expert in discrete geometry and combinatorial image analysis, will serve as research project mentors from Buffalo State.
