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TODAY Online news release:
https://www.todayonline.com/world/how-not-get-sick-plane-choose-your-seat-wisely
El Pais press release: (in Spanish)
https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/29/ciencia/1522309451_960713.html
The College of Sciences has selected Matthew Baker as the inaugural Associate Dean for Faculty Development. The position was created to complement the positions of Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Associate Dean for Research. Baker is a professor in the School of Mathematics. He will begin his new role on July 1, 2018.
The Associate Dean for Faculty Development in the College of Sciences is responsible for developing, implementing, and assessing programs that enhance the instructional, research, and career opportunities for faculty. Key areas of responsibility include faculty hiring; mentoring of faculty; faculty retention, promotion, and tenure; and diversity, equity, and inclusion at the faculty level.
“I’m delighted that Matt is willing to be the first holder of this important leadership position,” College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair Paul Goldbart says. “As a mathematician of global renown, an educator celebrated for the clarity of his lectures, and a faculty member with demonstrated accomplishments in service to Georgia Tech and the worldwide mathematics community, Matt is well positioned to advance our deep commitment to the professional development of faculty members as thriving, fulfilled researcher-educators who have extraordinary impact.”
Baker joined Georgia Tech in 2004 as an assistant professor of mathematics and was promoted to full professor in 2011. As a pure mathematician, he is treasured by the international mathematics community for the depth, power, and creativity of his research in some of the most demanding aspects of pure mathematics, such as algebraic and arithmetic geometry. His accomplishments have been recognized by numerous awards, including his election as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and selection for the Simons Fellowship in Mathematics in 2017.
As an educator, Baker is deeply committed to enhancing students’ experience, even in the most challenging mathematics courses. This has brought him awards for teaching excellence from both Georgia Tech and the University System of Georgia. Baker is also a thoughtful and effective leader, as he demonstrated during his service as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Mathematics.
“I’m honored to have been selected, and I look forward to being part of the College of Sciences leadership team,” Baker says. “I am eager to build upon the faculty-mentoring activities that Associate Dean for Research Julia Kubanek has introduced in recent years. I hope that my unique perspective as a mathematician is helpful in addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion – and of fairness and transparency in hiring, promotion, retention, and salary considerations. I look forward to supporting the needs of our diverse, accomplished, and ambitious faculty.”
Joseph Rabinoff and Matthew Torres are two of Georgia Tech’s 2018 CTL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award winners. Jointly supported by the Center for Teaching and Learning and BP America, the award recognizes the excellent teaching and educational innovation that junior faculty bring to campus.
JOSEPH RABINOFF: Helping both students and faculty
Joseph Rabinoff was recently promoted to associate professor in the School of Mathematics. Because many undergraduates take the fundamental mathematics courses he teaches, Rabinoff has had a broad impact on Georgia Tech undergraduates.
Students say Rabinoff makes mathematics relevant and engaging, especially the introductory classes he teaches. For his part, Rabinoff seeks to ensure that all students, whatever their majors, understand and even appreciate the material.
Rabinoff was heavily involved in developing the curriculum and course materials for Math 1553, Introduction to Linear Algebra. This is an engineering core course that is taken by thousands of Georgia Tech students every year. He created lecture slides, interactive demonstrations, and online homework problems. With colleague Dan Margalit, Rabinoff wrote a free online textbook for the course, “Interactive Linear Algebra.”
Beyond the classroom, Rabinoff spearheaded the creation of the School of Mathematics’ course repository and has been the main contributor to its infrastructure and content. The repository contains up-to-date curated materials that a new teacher can just pick up and use.
The students are the most exciting part about being at Georgia Tech, Rabinoff said in a 2016 Q&A. “Some students are extremely hard-working and talented. I derive a lot of pleasure from interactions in class and office hours,” he said.
In turn, students praise Rabinoff for his enthusiasm, engaging lectures, friendliness, accessibility, and, yes, his “super” “Rabinoffice” hours, which one students says “are fantastic during exam weeks.”
“It is an honor to be recognized with this award,” Rabinoff says. “The students I see every week in class and in office hours are great kids, and all of the effort is for them. Pedagogy is special in this way: The reward is not abstract; it is visible every time I see in a student's face that a light went on in their head. I’m very fortunate to have the opportunity to teach in a place like Georgia Tech.”
MATTHEW TORRES: Teaching life skills
Matthew Torres also was recently promoted to associate professor, in the School of Biological Sciences. Although he always knew he would be a scientists, he never thought about being a teacher. At Georgia Tech he has recognized that, “first and foremost,” he is a teacher.
Having embraced the role of an educator, his dedication is obvious to students and colleagues. Students regard him not only as an excellent teacher, but also as someone who believes in them and sees their potential. Students say Torres’s mentorship goes beyond biology: Torres helps them develop critical skills that will serve them throughout their lives – such as written and spoken scientific communication, self-reflection, and how to confront failure productively.
Colleagues say Torres is a natural teacher, taking every opportunity to teach and mentor students in Georgia Tech and beyond. He gives students personal attention and invests time and resources to ensure student learning. A colleague describes Torres as “dedicated, caring, thoughtful, and highly successful in both teaching and research.”
Torres regularly invites undergraduates to do research in his lab, participating in work to address chemical biology questions that Torres’s research seeks to answer. These undergraduates are listed as coauthors on publications. In running his lab and in his teaching, Torres instills open communications and mutual respect as values that advance everyone’s progress.
Community engagement is important to Torres. He has volunteered to mentor high school students from the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. He routinely gives laboratory tours to local high schools focusing on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
“Winning this award is fantastic, but I’m also very lucky,” Torres says. “Lucky enough to have had wonderful students – undergraduate, graduate, and beyond – willing to join me on a journey in pursuit of greater understanding and scientific progress. Such a journey can’t happen because of a teacher alone – it takes bright, receptive, and brave students to help guide the way.”
For the last 35 years, NSF has supported national institutes that organize the research in Mathematics. These Mathematical Sciences Institutes are comprised of eight U.S.-based institutes that receive funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent U.S. government agency that supports research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering.
Every semester, each of these Institutes picks an important topic, and invites the top experts in these fields to come interact, give lectures, workshops, and to train postdocs. These semesters are very influential and set the direction of research nationally and internationally.
In recent years, our collegues in the SoM have been selected as organizers of several of these institutes, confirming the global leadership of the School of Mathematics here at Georgia Tech in several important areas of Mathematics.
Last year, Prof. P. Tetali and adjunct Prof. D. Randall were Co-PI's of a successful grant to organize an "Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science" for the NSF. https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1740776
In Fall '18, Prof. A. Fathi will be the lead organizer and Prof. R. de la Llave will be an organizer of a "jumbo" program on "Hamiltonian systems, from topology to applications through analysis" at MSRI. https://www.msri.org/programs/305
In Fall '18, Prof. A. Leykin will be the organizer of a program in "Nonlinear Algebra" for ICERM. https://icerm.brown.edu/programs/sp-f18/
In Spring '17, Prof. M. Lacey was one of the lead organizers of a program in "Harmonic Analysis" at MSRI. https://www.msri.org/programs/300
In Fall '14, and again in Spring '15, Prof. P. Tetali was one of organizers of the program on "Discrete Structures: Analysis and Applications" at IMA. https://www.ima.umn.edu/2014-2015
Math PhD student Bhanu Kumar has been offered a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF18) with Rafael de la Llave as principal investigator. This highly prestigious fellowship provides selected students with financial support and gives them the opportunity to collaborate with researchers at NASA and other research laboratories.
By the time Libby Taylor graduated from Wheeler High School, she had already completed her freshman and sophomore years at Georgia Tech. Beginning as a junior may be daunting to some, but because the Marietta, Georgia, native already knew that she loves Tech, deciding to stay for two more years came easily. This untraditional path began during her sophomore year of high school, when she took calculus through Georgia Tech’s Distance Math program. The next year, she signed up as a full-time dual-enrolment student.
Wheeler’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) magnet program allowed Taylor to immerse herself in science and mathematics. Originally, she planned to major in chemistry, but once on campus she gravitated to mathematics.
Her extraordinary mathematical talents were recognized earlier this year by the Association for Women in Mathematics, which awarded Taylor the 2018 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize. Now, only two years after high school, she’s graduating with a B.S. in Mathematics
What is the most important thing you learned at Georgia Tech?
The most important thing I learned at Georgia Tech is that professors do not bite. Seriously, most students think that professors are intimidating. In my experience, that has never been the case. All the professors I've interacted with have been incredibly nice people and have been more than willing to help with any questions I've had, including the really dumb questions.
One way that Georgia Tech surpassed my expectations was in how hard the students here work. People are very motivated to learn, and they're willing to put in a lot of work to get where they want to be.
"My most vivid memory is the time I solved my first research problem. I had been close to a solution for a couple of days, and when I finally put the pieces together, it was while I was out buying groceries!"
What are your proudest achievements at Georgia Tech?
Probably winning the 2018 Alice T. Schafer prize. That prize was a great honor. It validated both the work I had put into my career and the contributions of the professors who advised me along the way.
Which professors or classes made a big impact on you?
In my senior year of high school, I took math courses from Matt Baker and Tom Trotter. Because of their mentorship, I discovered my love of mathematics and began my first research projects that same year. Their guidance throughout the past three years has been invaluable and has been a major component in my being accepted to graduate school at Stanford, which has always been one of my dream schools.
Although I have never taken a class from Christine Heitsch, she has given me a lot of good advice, both for professional development and for life in general.
Padma Srinivasan, who taught my algebraic number theory class, was a big factor in my decision to study number theory in graduate school. Her enthusiasm for number theory and arithmetic geometry have proved contagious, and she has been a great resource for mathematics, as well as a great friend.
What is your most vivid memory of Georgia Tech?
My most vivid memory is the time I solved my first research problem. I had been close to a solution for a couple of days, and when I finally put the pieces together, it was while I was out buying groceries!
I didn't have a proper notebook to write the solution, so I pulled a pack of stickie notes out of my purse and wrote a proof on those. That stickie-note proof turned into my first paper.
How did Georgia Tech transform your life?
When I started at Georgia Tech, I didn't really know what I wanted to study; I was considering chemistry, physics, or economics. It was in my second year at Georgia Tech that I realized I loved mathematics, and I hit the ground running after that.
What unique learning activities did you undertake?
I did a study abroad in China the summer after my second year. It gave me a chance to see a part of the world that I would never have gotten to see so much of otherwise, and it threw me into an environment where I was forced to be uncomfortable.
I improved my Chinese language skills a lot by necessity, and I got a chance to navigate in a country with which I was entirely unfamiliar. Some of my favorite memories (and best stories!) from Georgia Tech came from that trip.
What advice would you give to incoming undergraduate students at Georgia Tech?
Go to your professors’ office hours! Even if you aren't struggling in the class, go anyway to chat about course material. You’ll learn a lot from those conversations, and you will probably come away with a much deeper understanding of what’s being covered in class and why it’s important.
Where are you headed after graduation? How did your Georgia Tech education prepare you for this next step?
I am headed to Stanford to pursue my Ph.D. in Mathematics. Georgia Tech has prepared me very well for graduate school by giving me a chance to get research experience, take graduate courses, and present at conferences, all of which are crucial skills for graduate school.
Prof. Sung Ha Kang receives the 2018 Herman K Fulmer Faculty Teaching Award in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. This award recognizes Prof. Kang’s exceptional work in teaching Differential Equations over the last decade. Essentially, every student who has taken Differential Equations over this period has been impacted by Professor Kang’s expertise on this course, through her work in the classroom, as well as on course content and format, mentorship of other instructors, and pedagogical outlook.
The establishment of the Herman K. Fulmer Faculty Teaching Fund Endowment for the School of Mathematics (SOM) is credited to the late Howard Woodham ( Georgia Tech alumnus, Engineering ’48), who created this award in memory of Professor Herman Fulmer, his former mathematics professor. Each year this award recognizes one of our faculty who exhibit genuine regard for undergraduate students during the first few years of their Engineering studies at Georgia Tech.
A new national project, which includes the Georgia Institute of Technology, aims to convey the benefits of physics’ age-old intertwining with math upon biology, a science historically less connected with it. The National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation have launched four centers to do this, funded with $40 million, one of which is headquartered at Georgia Tech and will receive a quarter of the funding.
Founding Members of the Organization include:
- Greg Bleckerman (GaTech SoM math)
- Christine Heitsch (GaTech SoM math)
- Natasha Jonoska (USF math)
- Julie Mitchell (UW-Madison math)
- Peter Bubenik (U. Florida math)
- Elena Dimitrova (Clemson math)
- Scott McKinley (Tulane math)
- Dan Goldman (GaTech physics)
- Francesca Storici (GaTech bio)
- Annalise Paaby (GaTech bio)
- Matt Torres (GaTech bio)
- Hang Lu (GaTech biochem)
- Melissa Kemp (GaTech bio-eng)
- Christine Payne (GaTech mech-eng)
This article was edited from a story originally posted 5/24/2018 by Ben Brumfield.
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