Special Events and Conferences

Moderator

Ron Buckmire has been on the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles since 1994; his current title is Professor of Mathematics. Ron served as a Program Officer in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education from 2011 to 2013. His research areas are numerical analysis and mathematical modeling.

Panelists

Mario Javier Bencomo was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and raised in El Paso Texas. He received his B.S. in physics and applied mathematics from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2010. He is currently a 4th year graduate student in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department at Rice University.

Ryan Hynd is an Assistant Professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Georgia Tech and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley. His primary research interests are in partial differential equations, stochastic optimal control, mathematical finance, continuum mechanics, and calculus of variations.

Monica Jackson obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from Clark Atlanta University and a PhD in applied mathematics and computational science from University of Maryland. She is an Associate Professor of Statistics at American University. In 2012, she won the Morton Bender Prize for top research by an Associate Professor at American University. Her research is in spatial statistics and disease surveillance with applications to methods of detecting cancer.

Amanda Ruiz is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego. She received a Master’s degree in mathematics from San Francisco State University, a PhD in mathematics from Binghamton University and was a teaching and research postdoctoral fellow at Harvey Mudd College. Amanda’s research is primarily in matroid theory and enumerative combinatorics.