Congrats to Recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) from Obama

I heard today the wonderful news that one of my UMass Amherst colleagues, Professor Sandra Petersen, is one of the fourteen recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), which was announced by President Obama at the White House.

A few years back I had served on  the committee making the selections.

According to the press release issued by the National Science Foundation:
PAESMEM recognizes outstanding efforts of mentors in encouraging the next generation of innovators and developing a science and engineering workforce that reflects the diverse talent of America. The mentors will receive their awards at a White House ceremony later this year.

The recipients of the individual awards and the organization award are truly extraordinary and are listed in the release on NSF's website:

Individual awards

• Luis Colón, State University of New York- Buffalo. Established program to increase minority students, especially Hispanics, in the chemical sciences field
• Anne E. Donnelly, University of Florida. Successfully guided dozens of undergraduate and graduate STEM students, many through creation of a mentoring program so fruitful it spread to other universities
• Lorraine Fleming, Howard University. Director of the school's Science, Engineering and Mathematics mentoring program that prepares students academically, socially and professionally for a career in STEM
• Shelia M. Humphreys, University of California, Berkeley. Improved recruitment, retention and success of underrepresented groups in Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
• Murty S. Kambhampati, Southern University at New Orleans. Engaged high school and undergraduate students in research, successfully boosting graduation rates
• Raymond L. Johnson, University of Maryland. Guided many minority students, at his home institution and across the nation, to complete degrees in mathematics, which has notoriously low retention rates
• Gary S. May, Georgia Institute of Technology. Created new mentoring models, including collaborations with other institutions and researchers, which have increased the participation of minorities in science and engineering
• John Tilak Ratnanather, Johns Hopkins University. Created a system to support deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in STEM
• John Matsui, University of California, Berkeley. Co-founded a renowned undergraduate diversity program in the school's Biology department, a model replicated at schools throughout the U.S.
• Beth Olivares, University of Rochester. Mentored hundreds of students through the STEM pipeline and advocated for STEM opportunities for low-income students both regionally and nationally
• Elizabeth A. Parry, North Carolina State University. Worked to increase the accessibility of engineering to students--from kindergarten through university--and their parents
• Sandra Petersen, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Director of a consortium of research colleges and minority-serving institutions which has tripled enrollments of underrepresented groups in STEM fields
• John B. Slaughter, University of Southern California. Developed numerous mentoring programs, at both the national and university level, to boost minority participation in STEM; also served as the first African American director of NSF (1980-82)
• Julio Soto, San Jose State University. Mentored hundreds of students, both personally and through nationally funded programs he developed

Organizational award

• The GeoFORCE Program, University of Texas at Austin. An outreach program encouraging minority rural and inner-city youth to study geosciences and engineering.

Congratulations to the PAESMEM recipients for your outstanding work in mentorship in STEM!

Back in 2007,  I served on a panel with Dr. Petersen at the Isenberg School, which was organized by Dr. Barbara Pearson and it was on Women in Science Climate. The provided panelist presentations that are available still are below:

• Sandy Petersen: On progress and strategies at UMass (through the Neagep):  
• Anna Nagurney: On the contribution of professional organizations  http://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/nagurney-awis.pdf
• Jane Fountain: various publications at  http://people.umass.edu/jfountai/publ_reviews.htm

   I still have the message from Dr. Pearson, which said: "Our panelists were all great and we had lively and constructive comments and questions from the audience. We were happy to host Mass-AWIS and some K-12 teachers, community college faculty, and 5-College colleagues. Thank you to TWIST, Research Liaison & Development, the Center for Virtual Supernetworks and the student chapter of INFORMS, as well as the NEAGEP Interns for their sponsorship and help. It is encouraging that several groups are working toward raising awareness of issues of “inequalities” and taking steps to resolve them."

Defying Gravity and Success is the Best Revenge - Nurturing STEM Talent in Our Students, Females and Males

The article by Eileen Pollack in The New York Times, Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? is a must read. Eileen was one of only two females to receive an undergrad degree in physics from Yale in 1978 and writes eloquently about her experiences and those of other females then and more recently in the pursuit of studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. She asks a fundamental question as to why still in the new millennium there are so few women in science and math. The conclusion reached in her very thoughtful and well-written article, filled with highlights from various studies as well as personal stories, is that it is the culture and the lack of support and mentorship.

She ends her aticle by describing a picnic back at Yale recently at which there were several female grad students (it was a picnic for the physics and astrophysics departments) in which there were a few female grad students including one African American.  Pollack concludes as follows:
 

The young black woman told me she did her undergraduate work at a historically black college, then entered a master’s program designed to help minority students develop the research skills and one-on-one mentoring relationships that would help them make the transition to a Ph.D. program. Her first year at Yale was rough, but her mentors helped her through. “As my mother always taught me,” she said, “success is the best revenge.” 

As so many studies have demonstrated, success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture — a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees; a culture in which success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab; a culture in which female scientists are hired less frequently than men, earn less money and are allotted fewer resources.

The above speaks to resiliency and the role that, we, as educators, have in nurturing talent and confidence in our students, both females and males alike, in technical fields.  I teach in a business school but have 3 degrees in Applied Math, with a PhD in the specialty of operations research.  I love math, computer programming, and the applications that our tools and methodologies can help to formulate and solve from transportation to financial services to healthcare to logistics and supply chains. I have written about gender inequality in business schools as well.

A kind sentence can make a difference in a student's life and can give her (or him) the confidence to believe in her or himself and to pursue  advanced degrees and careers in areas where you may stand out (this may have some negatives, at first, but people will remember you).

My seventh grade math teacher, Mrs. Fuller, back in Yonkers, NY, said to me, "One day you will be a calculus professor." That statement has stayed with me to this day as have those that have said: "Anna, being a professor is the loneliest profession," and "Anna, the higher you rise, the greater of a target you will be." The latter two were by two of my male professors at Brown and there is wisdom in both statements, which I appreciate.

And culture is clearly so important so we need to increase the visibility of female scientists, engineers, and also business professionals and scholars. The Times article noted the rather stereotypical representation of female scientists and females in the TV series Big Bang Theory.

Let me give you a VERY cool and REAL example of a top female scientist, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the UMass Rising gala event last April that I wrote about -- the astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman. Cady received her undergrad degree from MIT and her PhD from UMass Amherst in polymer science and engineering.

The photo of Cady and me below was taken at the UMass Rising gala. Cady lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and son when not training and flying in outer space. She was one of the Masters of the Ceremony (along with Ken Feinberg).

There was an article yesterday in our local newspaper, the great Daily Hampshire Gazette (DHG), about Dr. Cady Coleman and how she consulted with Sandra Bullock on the movie Gravity, which will be released today and which also stars George Clooney. She was also featured in Mother Jones with the full article here as well as in Wired. 

In the DHG article, Cady states: I think it's an especially good film for girls. They need models of strong, courageous women who may not always know what to do, but can figure it out. I liked it, in that respect.

 So do be positive with your students -- a few words that recognize talent and an achievement can change a direction of a life!

A New Business Era for Analytics and Why Math Matters

According to The New York Times, there is a shortage of graduates with math skills, who can analyze the massive amounts of data that are now available for businesses (and other organizations).

Economists are saying that we are entering a new era, similar to the Industrial Revolution, in which the access to huge volumes of data can spur innovation, new products, and new business models.

McKinsey & Company issued a new report, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, which bodes well for those of us who, as business professors, teach the quantitative subjects, such as operations research / management science, as well as for our students.

Clearly statistics and experimental design and data mining are essential for filtering out the data streams but, as important, is knowing what to do with the data and how to optimize our business (and other) processes accordingly. We can't just sit and analyze the past but need to work on managing the world's resources for a safer, more secure, and sustainable future. Math matters and, besides, not only is it so much fun but doing and applying math is also rewarding and useful!

Perhaps the US will finally wake up and realize how essential math education is to the present and the future of our country and its very competitiveness.

Loving What You Do and Solving the Biggest Problems

CNN has an Opinion Piece by Professor Terence Tao, about whom I have written about in this blog when Forbes featured him. In the Opinion Piece, Professor Tao's love of his work shines through. He is a renowned mathematician, having started his PhD at Princeton at the age of 16, and is now a Professor of Mathematics and the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Science at UCLA. He was born in Australia and is also a citizen of the US.

He writes that, as a child, he: loved games with clear, unambiguous rules; puzzles that were tough but fair; and the clean, abstract, simplicity of numbers and symbols. He says that: it is perhaps not surprising that [he] has been drawn to mathematics for as long as [he] can remember.

Life is not always fair, but being part of a profession that acknowledges when you solve an important problem, is very satisfying (of course, the individual gets the personal satisfaction of the discovery as well and gets it first).

Professor Tao then states that: mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols, but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.

Indeed, the tools of mathematics (accompanied by the use of computers, I might add) are being applied to solve problems in business (from logistics to marketing to finance and accounting). Math is used in healthcare, and in humanitarian operations. It is an essential tool in engineering, in physics, in computer science, in economics, in sociology, and even in biology. Math makes the world hum. It makes order out of disorder and helps to explain chaos. Math "works" and helps to resolve the greatest puzzles of today.

Besides what could be more gratifying than solving problems!

Bill Gates (who needs no introduction) recently visited Harvard University and spoke there. He said, in his speech, that the biggest problems require the best minds. You can find some of the problems that he believes need our attention in this Harvard Gazette article. Obviously, innovative and accessible education is the foundation for it all!

A Million Dollars for Solving a Math Problem -- Will the Winner Show Up?

The Clay Mathematics Institute has announced the winner of the 1 million dollar prize for the resolution of the Poincare conjecture, which is a conjecture in a branch of mathematics known as topology. The announcement was made this week by Dr. James Carlson, the President of the Clay Institute, that Dr. Grigoriy Perelman of St.Petersburg, Russia is the winner of this prize.

Dr. Perelman in 2006 received the prestigious Fields Medal but never claimed it. The New York Times, in an article, is wondering whether he will (or will not) claim the million dollar prize for solving a longstanding mathematics problem that was one of seven selected for the Millenium Awards by the Clay Institute, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Interestingly, Dr. Perelman, 7 years ago, in 3 papers posted on the Internet, provided the solution to this math problem, which was posed in 1904 by Poincare. The news of his results quickly spread (at least in math circles) and he embarked on a whirlwind series of speaking engagements, only to return back to Russia and then resign from his post at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. He stopped answering email messages and, in a sense, disappeared professionally.

According to The New York Times, several teams of mathematicians, using Dr. Perelman’s papers as a guide, completed a full proof of the conjecture in manuscripts hundreds of pages long, showing that Dr. Perelman was right.

The Clay Institute plans to hold a conference to celebrate the solution of the Poincaré conjecture on June 8 and 9 in Paris, France. Dr. Carlson was quoted as saying that Dr. Perelman will let him know in due time whether he will accept this prize.

There are 6 other math problems left as Millennium Problems, so for those who are interested, you may find the list here. The solution of any of these will garner you a million dollars.