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Jessica Brunner, a rising senior at Spelman College, takes the chance to conduct undergraduate research seriously. This year, she also wanted to make new friends — and got the opportunity to do both at Georgia Tech this summer thanks to the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.
“It was just a completely different experience,” Brunner said. “I was able to find a balance between research and socializing, because a lot of research is socializing. You're working with different people, you're working in different labs, or working with different areas of science. So this idea of socializing and networking, the relaying of information that different people have, it's just amazing.”
Every school in the Georgia Tech College of Sciences now offers a summer NSF REU. The Human Neuroscience Research and Techniques program that Brunner attended is led by the School of Psychology. The REU program is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“The NSF’s goal is to involve visiting students in high-quality mentored research programs with access to appropriate facilities, along with professional development and cohort building opportunities,” says David Collard, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences and a former director of REU programs in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry for more than a decade. “They help to better inform each participant’s decision about whether to pursue graduate studies. It is a credit to our programs that a majority of their recent participants have gone on to top graduate schools, some at Georgia Tech and others elsewhere."
The NSF leverages the REU program to boost participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The organization estimates that several million additional people, specifically more individuals from groups historically underrepresented in STEM fields, are needed for the country’s science and engineering workforce, to better reflect the demographics and representation of the U.S. population.
"I am delighted that each of our schools is able to contribute to NSF's vision for the development of the future STEM workforce in the U.S.," added Collard.
The College of Sciences spoke to several undergraduates who gave presentations at the REU poster sessions in July:
Emily Almgren, Mathematics REU, rising senior, Haverford College
Not many undergraduates get a chance to conduct research before they get their B.S. degree. How important is that to you?
“It's really important for figuring out whether I want to do research, whether I want to go to graduate school, and also what area of research I want to go into. it's really hard to know what kind of research you want to do without having done that research. So our views are really important for forming that decision of where to apply to grad school.”
Jessica Brunner, Psychology/Neuroscience REU, rising senior, Spelman College
What was your experience in this year’s REU?
“At first glance, it may seem daunting, but Spelman’s motto is to ‘forever remain undaunted’. So I came in with this ideology that I was going to be ready, and I was going to tackle anything that came my way, ready to do some hardcore research, and just experience what it's like to be a graduate student for a summer. This just solidified it more for me that this is definitely something that I see myself doing in the future, and I will be pursuing a Ph.D. after I graduate Spelman College.”
Marygrace Fagan, Physics REU, rising junior, Purdue University
What was your experience with the mentors you worked with in the Physics REU?
“Everyone in my lab has been super helpful. The grad students who are mentors are totally willing to help me whenever I have a question. I've learned a ton. Claire Berger (professor of the practice in the School of Physics) is my mentor, and she’s very good at explaining things. And you can tell she knows what she’s talking about. She co-wrote one of the first research papers on graphene. That’s so cool.”
Hector G. Torres De Jesus, Biological Sciences REU, rising junior, University of Puerto Rico
Why did you decide to attend this REU at Georgia Tech?
“I’m very interested in microbiology and marine biology, and the University of Puerto Rico is the only campus on the island that has marine biology as a major. We don’t have a lot of research opportunities there, so my mentor suggested an internship or undergraduate program in the U.S. because that way, you can find more marine biology courses. I read that Jennifer Glass (associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) had worked with microbiology and water microorganisms. That’s my type of research area.”
Aaron Lee, Math REU, rising senior, University of California, Davis
What brought you to Georgia Tech for an REU?
“Frankly, I was looking for things to do over the summer. And my mentor was like, 'Aaron, you should do an REU.' I applied a week before the deadline. And I thought, wow, it'd be really cool to work on this. I'm really interested in applied math. This is sort of a trial run for me — do I want to go to grad school? But personally, it's really important to me, just because I think I've always really wanted to do research, and contribute to the space of human knowledge.”
What do you hope to do for a career?
“I'm actually planning to become a teacher. And I really hope to share the enjoyment of math that I've had over the years with students. I think there are a lot of different ways to teach math. I really want to help people understand exactly why math is the way it is — and it's not just something that a bunch of old guys came up with to torture you.”
Zachary Farmer, Chemistry REU, rising junior, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
“It's been amazing. So far we’ve seen how work is done at the graduate level, and how graduate students organize themselves. My lab at my institution is pretty much like a teaching research lab. It’s nice to see everything sprawled out and all the researchers going hard at it. As far as networking, I think it's a fantastic idea to incorporate other students from other disciplines so you can kind of work off of what they're doing. I just think it's good exposure to other disciplines.”
College of Sciences REUs:
Aquatic Chemical Ecology Summer Research Program
(Co-hosted by the Schools of Biological Sciences, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and from the College of Engineering: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.)
Broadening Participation Summer Undergraduate Research Program in Physics
(Hosted by the School of Physics)
Mathematics Research Experiences for Undergraduates
(Hosted by the School of Mathematics)
Broadening Participation in Atmospheric Science, Oceanography and Geosciences Research
(Hosted by the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)
Chemistry Function, Application, Structure, and Theory (FAST)
(Hosted by the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry)
Human Neuroscience Research and Techniques
(Hosted by the School of Psychology)
More information on applying for Georgia Tech summer REUs, including requirements and deadlines, can be found at the individual REU links here.
Prof. Rafael de la Llave is quoted in a Quanta article about research into the dynamics of the solar system. An excerpt from the article:
But research in the 18th century by mathematical giants like Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange indicated that, precession aside, the size and shape of the ellipse are stable. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that this intuition started to shift, when Henri Poincaré found that even in a model with just three bodies (say, a star orbited by two planets), it’s impossible to compute exact solutions to Newton’s equations. “Celestial mechanics is a delicate thing,” said Rafael de la Llave, a mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Alter the initial conditions by a hair — for example, by shifting the assumed position of one planet by a mere meter, as Laskar and Gastineau did in their simulations — and over long timescales the system can look very different.
An excerpt from the article:
It was anticipated more than a century ago that the distribution of real-world observations' first digits would not be uniform but would exhibit a trend where numbers with lower first digits (1,2,...) occur more frequently than those with higher first digits (...,8,9). This phenomenon is known as Benford's law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law. It was finally proven in 1995 by Theodore P. Hill, emeritus professor in the School of Mathematics. This law has been found to apply to a wide range of datasets, from countries' populations to financial data, physical constants and earthquakes.
Wilhelm Schlag will give a Stelson Lecture, hosted by SoM.
Date: March 10th, 4-5pm
Location: Klaus 1443 Lecture Auditorium
Title: Nonlinear waves, spectra, and dynamics in infinite dimensions.
Abstract:
Waves are ubiquitous in nature. Some wave phenomena are conspicuous, most notably in elastic objects, and in bodies of water. In electro-dynamics, quantum mechanics, and gravity, waves play a fundamental role but are much more difficult to find. Over the past centuries, major scientific breakthroughs have been associated with the discovery of hidden wave phenomena in nature. Engineering has enabled our modern information based society by developing sophisticated methods which allow us to harness wave propagation. Seismic exploration relies on wave scattering in the discovery of natural resources. Medicine depends heavily on wave-based imaging technology such as MRI and CAT scans.
Mathematics has played a major role in the understanding of wave propagation, and its many intricate phenomena including reflection, diffraction, and refraction. In its most basic form, the wave equation is a linear partial differential equation (PDE). However, modern science and engineering rely heavily on nonlinear PDEs which can exhibit many surprising and delicate properties. Mathematical analysis continues to evolve rapidly driven in part by the many open questions surrounding nonlinear PDEs and their solutions. This talk will survey some of the mathematics involved in our understanding of waves, both linear and nonlinear.
About the speaker:
Professor Wilhelm Schlag is the Phillips Professor of Mathematics and the Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Yale University. A world-leading expert in harmonic analysis, mathematical physics, and partial differential equations, much of Schlag’s work has been devoted to the study of wave propagation, both in structured as well as in disordered media.
Schlag is a recipient of Sloan and Guggenheim fellowships, among others. He was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematical Physics in 2012 as well as an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, he was the Holmer J. Livingston Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. Before that, he served as professor at the California Institute of Technology, and as assistant professor at Princeton University.
Wilhelm Schlag will also give a colloquium talk on March 14th. Details can be found on the seminar page.
This spring, Georgia Tech will host one of the largest regional meetings of mathematicians in the country. The 2023 Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) comes to campus March 18-19, 2023.
Approximately 800 mathematicians are expected to attend lectures and special sessions in Skiles and Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, with a reception scheduled for Saturday evening at the Academy of Medicine.
Michael Wolf, professor and chair of the School of Mathematics, said the AMS meeting is shaping up to be one of the busier ones in recent memory.
"Georgia Tech is just thrilled to be hosting this sectional meeting of the American Mathematical Society, and we've been amazed at the response. This will be one of the larger sectional meetings to be held,” Wolf said.
“Mathematics advances through sustained conversation, and one can see the hunger for personal connection that has built up over the pandemic,” he added, “reflected in the large number of special sessions and the robust attendance. We are looking forward to a wonderful event where we can all reconnect in person with mathematicians we have not seen in a while and younger people can join the community that has only recently opened up beyond the virtual."
41 special sessions are scheduled for the AMS meeting. Topics speak to a wide range of mathematics research interests: combinatorics, the intersection of math and biology, geometric group theory, quantum systems, disease transmission, big data, and new methods for teaching math to undergraduates.
Special AMS lectures on tap
A School of Mathematics alumna will deliver one of the four invited addresses at the Southeastern Sectional Meeting. Blair Dowling Sullivan graduated from Georgia Tech in 2003 with a double major in applied mathematics and computer science.
Sullivan went on to receive her M.A. and Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University. After internships with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Microsoft, she served on the faculty of North Carolina State University. She is currently an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Her address, “Taking a Hard Look at Generalized Coloring Numbers,” is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Saturday, March 18 in Clough Room 152.
The AMS’s annual Erdős Memorial Lecture, named for prolific mathematician Paul Erdős (1913-1996), will be given by Amie Wilkinson, professor at the University of Chicago, at 5 p.m. on Saturday in Clough Room 152. Wilkinson’s Erdős Lecture is titled “Symmetry Rigidity.”
Wilkinson’s research interest is smooth dynamical systems and their relationship with other structures in pure mathematics — geometric, statistical, topological, and algebraic.
“The basic idea of dynamical systems is that you do some ‘move’ to a ‘space’ over and over again, and try to figure out what will happen in the long term,” explains Dan Margalit, a School of Mathematics professor whose research topics include topology and geometric group theory.. “An example is what happens to the solar system in the long term? Will Jupiter fly out of the solar system, or will it stay in orbit around the sun forever? Another example is the rolling of pastry dough, like a croissant. This is an example of a chaotic dynamical system.”
Margalit, a co-organizer of the meeting along with fellow School of Mathematics Professor Greg Blekherman, adds that Wilkinson has published many times in top journals such as Annals of Mathematics. She has also been very active with educational and public outreach.
“It will be a very lively atmosphere,” Margalit added.
Learn more: 2023 AMS Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting
Words like billiards, flowers, and stadium get mentioned a lot alongside Leonid Bunimovich’s name. Yet in this context, none of these terms refer to pool tables, botany, or places where World Cup games are played — along with Bunimovich mushrooms, which you (fortunately and hopefully) won’t find on any pizzas or salads.
Instead, these terms refer to the visualization of mathematical concepts — and they’ve made Bunimovich, a Regents’ Professor in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, quite well-known among his peers.
The researcher’s concepts are used by physicists and mathematicians around the world to describe ways to study dynamical systems, Bunimovich’s chief research area. Dynamical systems theory uses mathematical tools to model many components of a phenomena that exists and needs to be explained, and whose state changes over time.
“A current state of the object is described by some characteristics — positions and velocities of particles, for example, or concentrations of some types of viruses,” Bunimovich explains. Their evolution can be regular — fixed and relatively easy to predict, or complex (chaotic = quasi-random) and not so easy to predict, or both.
Dynamical systems can model changes over time of numbers in data, bringing some clarity to economic theories. They can model phenomena in health and medicine, weather patterns, planetary bodies, and quantum mechanics; any complex system with lots of moving parts that needs to be observed, understood, and predicted.
Knowing how those particles bounce off walls of a Bunimovich stadium, and each other, and their trajectories, can help mathematicians and physicists provide better predictability to those movements.
Bunimovich is modest about his fame in the field. “Mostly the billiards give people a vision of chaotic dynamics. All these Bunimovich stadiums, mushrooms, flowers, provide such visual examples which demonstrate that some unimaginable before types of evolutions (changes) may occur, and how it happens.” He says an old saying proves his point: it is better to see just once than hear a hundred times.
Figuring out those patterns helped researchers develop chaos theory, “one of the major discoveries of the 20th century,” Bunimovich explains. Chaos theory examines random or unpredictable behaviors in dynamical systems run by fixed deterministic rules, and it is applied to a range of scientific and mathematical disciplines.
Updating math concepts for the 21th century
Bunimovich notes that he wasn’t the first to use the concept of billiards to study dynamical systems. Y.G. Sinai, Bunimovich’s former adviser currently at Princeton University, wrote a 1970 paper introducing the concept of dynamical billiards, where a point particle bounces around inside a rectangular shape with a removed circle as in a billiards game, but without losing its speed.
Sinai was himself a student of A.N. Kolmogorov, one of the greatest Russian mathematicians who conducted pioneering research in probability, theory of functions, turbulence theory, and complexity theory. It was Kolmogorov “who particularly built a bridge between random and deterministic worlds, and random and deterministic systems,” Bunimovich said.
Dan Margalit, a fellow professor in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, adds that Bunimovich is credited with taking these concepts introduced by other Russian mathematicians and updating them for 21th century uses in probability and quantum theory, as well as physics. “The basic idea is that you have a billiard table of a certain shape, and you want to know if I shoot a frictionless billiard ball in some direction, will it eventually travel over the whole table,” Margalit said.
Another way to visualize dynamical systems is through Bunimovich mushroom billiards, which get their name from their caps-and-stems shapes that form in visualizations that depict particle movements. “It is a general belief, although not proved, that typical dynamical systems have regions with regular motion/dynamics, or stable islands, situated in chaotic seas where dynamics is chaotic,” he said. “Mushrooms are the only large class of billiards where such coexistence was proved. Moreover, they are very visual and easy to build, which has been done in various physics labs.”
The origins of a Bunimovich stadium and Bunimovich elliptical flowers
The trajectories of any particle resembling a billiard ball also play a part in Bunimovich’s development of a stadium, which he introduced in a 1974 paper. The American Mathematical Society defines a Bunimovich stadium as “a rectangle capped by semicircles in which a particle moves at constant speed along straight lines, reflecting off the boundary in a way that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.”
Bunimovich’s stadium showed that generally, chaotic dynamics was much more common for all dynamical systems than previously thought. “It is just a more deep understanding of chaos, and a stadium allows for rigorous mathematical proof of discovery which physicists did not believe until they made experiments and saw it.”
A recent Bunimovich discovery: elliptical flower billiards, which may help with experimental studies in physics labs as well as mathematical ones, according to the abstract of Bunimovich’s 2021 paper on the subject. Elliptical flower billiards take into account other factors that may impact the trajectories of the billiards.
“Elliptic flowers are the only ones where the coexistence of chaotic and non-chaotic regions is rigorously proved, and non-chaotic regions do not have a very specific shape like in mushroom billiards,” Bunimovich said. These changes of shape can help researchers make better sense of classical systems, whose variables are strictly defined and can be precisely measured, and quantum systems, where the action happens at the atomic or subatomic level.
‘Mathematics and physics can be beautiful’
Nils Berglund, a professor of mathematics at the University of Orleans in France, has produced YouTube videos showing Bunimovich elliptical flowers billiards, which he calls “examples of systems that can be proved to have mixed dynamics, with both regular and chaotic trajectories.” The resulting animations are colorful representations of Bunimovich’s innovations and those of other mathematicians.
“With these animations, I am trying to show that mathematics and physics can be beautiful,” Berglund shares on his channel. “They are all based on real models in physics and math, typically describing the evolution in time of some system: a particle or a wave in a closed domain, a growing interface, a population of animals.”
Bunimovich’s elliptical flower discovery isn’t quite two years old, so he doesn’t expect that a lot of physicists know about it yet. “But I fully expect they will build elliptical flowers in physics labs, as it was with the stadium and mushrooms.”
Bunimovich’s unique creations offer others like Berglund a chance to inject some 21th century creativity into math and physics problems. But to Bunimovich, it’s all in line with traditional scientific processes, beginning with observations.
“All science is a collection of studies that started with just observations of evolution in time of various objects — for example, the motion of planets and the sun. A general, and basically true opinion is that mathematicians prove only the things which physicists did already know or which did not have any physical or scientific meaning. But there are exceptions when mathematicians discover some phenomena which physicists never imagined to exist.”
These studies of purely deterministic dynamical systems provide some foundation for theories, but they still involve probabilities; a mix of the known and the unknown.
“This topic is at the border of philosophy,” Bunimovich said.
Over 15 faculty from the College of Sciences have been recognized for their teaching excellence by Georgia Tech’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) in the Fall 2022 Course Instructor Opinion Survey (CIOS).
Using optional feedback from students, the survey serves to celebrate instructors who exhibit exceptional respect and concern for students, ability to stimulate interest in the subject matter of the course, and enthusiasm for course content.
Four College of Sciences faculty have won the Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: CIOS Awards, while 14 faculty have been named to the Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 CIOS Honor Roll for Fall 2022.
“To be named as a Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching awardee, or appearing on the honor roll, is a significant accomplishment for our faculty,” shared David Collard, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and senior associate dean in the College of Sciences. “Those who are recognized in this way have made strong connections with their students, both in lecture courses and in our instructional laboratories. I imagine that these are the faculty that their students will fondly remember long after graduation.”
College of Sciences recipients of the Fall 2022 “Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: CIOS Awards” include:
Small Classes:
Kirill Lobachev, associate professor, School of Biological Sciences
Deborah Santos, academic professional, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Samantha Wilson, academic professional, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Large Classes:
Emily Weigel, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences
College of Sciences recipients of the Fall 2022 “Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 CIOS Honor Roll” include:
Small Classes:
School of Mathematics — Austin Christian, postdoctoral researcher
School of Biological Sciences — Brian Hammer, associate professor; Colin Harrison, senior academic professional
Neuroscience — Alberto Stolfi, assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences
Large Classes:
School of Biological Sciences — Young-Hui Chang, professor and associate chair for Faculty Development; Adam Decker, senior academic professional and director of Anatomical Sciences
School of Mathematics — Miriam Kuzbary, postdoctoral researcher
Neuroscience — Qiliang He, postdoctoral researcher, School of Biological Sciences; Christina Ragan, lecturer, School of Biological Sciences
School of Psychology — Meghan Babcock, academic professional; Dobromir Rahnev, associate professor; Keaton Fletcher, assistant professor
Matt Baker appears on the cover of the MAA publication Math Horizons, and is featured in an article "On Magic and Math - A Conversation with Matt Baker".
See this link for the article: https://maa.tandfonline.com/journals/umho20
Excerpts from the article:
MH. Is it true that every number theorist loves quadratic reciprocity? Is it required to get a PhD in number theory?
MB. I feel like that’s an informal, if not a formal, requirement. During my oral exam at Berkeley, Ken Ribet asked me what my favorite proof of quadratic reciprocity was. At that time, I didn’t have an original proof, so I just told him my favorite one that existed; that’s the kind of question you actually get as a student in number theory. But my favorite now is my card-dealing proof. There’s something unusual about being able to explain basically the whole proof in terms of dealing cards that fits me particularly well; it’s kind of uniquely branded to me.
MH Have you ever used magic to inspire math research?
MB. Glenn Stevens asked me to mentor students in the PROMYS program. One group explored a magic trick I had recently devised. The idea was that you have a stack of cards in some order, and with as few questions as possible, you want to get enough information so that you can determine what cards people have. Diaconis and Graham have a well-known trick like this using de Bruijn sequences. The students proved a nice theorem—they characterized when you have a special generalized de Bruijn sequence. As far as we can tell, it’s a new theorem, which I found surprising.
MH. Do you have advice for aspiring mathematicians, magicians, or anyone trying to pursue their passions?
MB. It’s fine to just do something because you love it. But the older I get, the more I care about the impact that I can have. So I think you should spend your precious time not just on something you enjoy, but also on things that you can share with others to bring them enjoyment. The time I spend thinking about magic eventually pays off in that way. The same goes for my math work. I could spend my time trying to prove a theorem and write a paper about it, and if it’s a really good result, that might be the best use of my time. But right now, I actually find that stuff I can share with people (like with my blog or integration of recreational math ideas) is probably going to have a bigger impact than a technical paper that gets read by a handful of mathematicians. I’ve learned to give myself permission to be playful, and I encourage others to do the same.
Finally, you can’t just learn everything about math and use all of it. You have to be a little more focused. My advice is to strive to become interested in at least a couple things that are seemingly unrelated and perhaps become quite good at one of those things. Then really try to push the connections a bit because it’s just way more likely that you’ll make a breakthrough that way.
For STEAM enthusiasts across Atlanta, the month of March is a highlight of the year for one big reason: the Atlanta Science Festival.
Occurring annually since in 2014, the Atlanta Science Festival is a "celebration of the world-class learning and STEM career opportunities in metro Atlanta, featuring 150 engaging events for curious kids and adults at venues all across the region." As a founding sponsor, Georgia Tech has been an intricate part of the Festival since its inception. Now in its tenth iteration, this year's festival will host events from March 10 – 24, culminating in the Exploration Expo — a large, interactive event in Piedmont Park — on March 25.
The NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program is designed to provide meaningful research experiences to undergraduates who may not otherwise have the opportunity, with an ultimate goal of increasing matriculation in STEM careers and graduate school.
Most NSF REU programs are designed to pair students attending smaller and undergraduate-only schools with faculty and lab groups at larger host institutions for mentorship and a meaningful research experience.
Importantly, as NSF notes, the inclusion of historically under-represented groups in STEM (minorities, low socio-economic status, first generation students, veterans and women) will serve to broaden the STEM talent pool.
As such, most REU programs in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech host a diverse cohort of approximately ten non-Georgia Tech undergraduates, who have limited research opportunities at their current institution. Each unique program's focus and requirements vary, so check individual program links for application guidelines and deadlines. Each of the six schools in the College of Sciences participate in the eight to 10-week program. The REU supplements — which include stipends, housing, and travel allowances — engage students in research related to a new or ongoing NSF research award. Application deadlines are typically in January and February each year, depending on the program.
“Georgia Tech has had a long, outstanding record of hosting REU students,” said College of Sciences Assistant Dean for Academic Programs Cameron Tyson. “We are delighted that we can offer programs affiliated with each of the six schools in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech.”
Summer 2023 NSF REU programs in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech are:
Aquatic Chemical Ecology (ACE) Summer Research Program
(Co-hosted by the Schools of Biological Sciences, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and from the College of Engineering: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.)
Students participate in research with one or more faculty, and learn about careers in science and engineering, and see how scientists blend knowledge and skills from physics, chemistry, and biology to investigate some of the most challenging problems in environmental sciences. Three areas of research activities covered by faculty in the Aquatic Chemical Ecology program include biological and geochemical transformations of chemicals in aquatic ecosystems, sensory biology and ecology of aquatic chemical communication, and ecological roles and consequences of chemicals in aquatic environments.
Broadening Participation Summer Undergraduate Research Program in Physics
(Hosted by the School of Physics)
This program includes a hands-on computational workshop, an overnight trip to a National Laboratory, a weekly Physics Frontiers Lunch and Learn seminar series, a half-dozen professional development seminars, and social activities with other REU students. At the end of the summer, participants will present their research to the School of Physics community and at a Georgia Tech REU Poster Symposium that includes REU participants from all the REU programs in the Georgia Tech College of Sciences.
Mathematics Research Experiences for Undergraduates
(Hosted by the School of Mathematics)
REU summer projects in mathematics are mentored by many different faculty, on topics ranging from fad formation, to random walks, tropical geometry, one bit sensing, extremal graph theory, and convex polyhedra. Students will have the opportunities to publish papers, win awards, and succeed in graduate school applications.
Broadening Participation in Atmospheric Science, Oceanography and Geosciences Research
(Hosted by the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences)
Each participant will work with a faculty member or research scientist and focus on a single research project, but will also gain a broad perspective on research in Earth and atmospheric sciences by participating in the dynamic research environment. This interdisciplinary REU program has projects spanning topics related to the geosciences, planetary science, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, and climate science. In addition to full-time research, undergraduate researchers will participate in professional development activities, seminars with faculty and research scientists, presentation and research poster symposiums, and social activities with other summer REU students.
Chemistry Function, Application, Structure and Theory (FAST)
(Hosted by the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry)
The Chemistry Function, Application, Structure, and Theory (FAST) Program’s objective is to provide a high-quality research experience, augmented by experiential learning components, for a diverse group of undergraduate students. The program will provide participants with encouragement and preparation to pursue advanced studies and/or careers in the sciences while emphasizing the importance of collaboration and interdisciplinarity in chemistry.
Human Neuroscience Research and Techniques
(Hosted by the School of Psychology)
Working with Georgia State University, this program gives students the opportunity to gain knowledge and hands-on experience with human neuroscience techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants will also perform exciting research in the laboratories of Georgia Tech or Georgia State faculty mentors. Students will learn about neuroscience careers and tips for succeeding in graduate and medical school. The research areas of the faculty mentors are organized around three core neuroscience themes: Human Motor Control, Cognitive Processing, and Human Neurophysiology.
“These programs are an excellent opportunity for students, especially those from colleges and universities with limited research opportunities, to gain an immersive experience working alongside Georgia Tech faculty and their team on cutting-edge projects in science and mathematics,” added Tyson, who is also a faculty member in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “We often see participants having a transformative experience and continuing on to graduate studies and pursuing a career in research.”
For more information on REU summer program details, requirements and application deadlines, interested students should visit the links to individual programs listed here.
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