University of Washington VIGRE Program

Brief Description

The dominant distinguishing feature of our VIGRE program is its horizontal as well as its vertical integration, involving the departments of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics. We believe that it is unique among current VIGRE sites in this collaboration of three departments.

Our efforts build on an earlier collaboration to establish a joint undergraduate degree program in Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences (ACMS), together with the Computer Science department. ACMS majors all take a core preparation, and then select one of seven tracks, such as mathematical biology or operations research. The program has proved very popular, and has reached its target of 200 majors. For more details, see http://www.ms.washington.edu/acms/.

One way we achieve horizontal integration is through the ACMS Seminar, which has talks of wide interest from around campus and from industry each Friday afternoon. VIGRE fellows and postdocs from all three departments are encouraged to attend and even give talks. We have established cross-disciplinary research groups as well to encourage interactive work. A recent innovation is forming cross-departmental committees of VIGRE fellows and postdocs charged with responsibility for three aspects of the program: planning, undergraduate research, and web site. Quite a few excellent ideas have been generated by these committees, and they also give students a good window into what life is like in other departments (often quite surprising). For example, the planning committee thought some workshops on finding an academic job, and also on working in industry, would be very useful.

They set these up, they were quite well attended (55 participants from the three departments), and communicated a lot of information otherwise hard to come by.

VIGRE has helped us revise and improve courses. Our mathematical modeling course has been substantially revised with help from a VIGRE postdoc, and perhaps is this is responsible in part for the recent success of having two of the top winning teams in the COMAP math modeling contest. We have developed versions of a mathematical communication course as well, but now feel this may be best done by integrating its ideas into our mentoring and other activities.

VIGRE helps support an established REU summer program. There are also a wide range of undergraduate research projects being supported, which involved faculty and postdocs as well. For example, one team of three undergraduates is being mentored by a faculty member and an NSF postdoc on non-commutative curves, with a goal of completing a specific computation of interest to the faculty member.

One additional unique feature is our membership in the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences (PIMS). PIMS is supporting half a dozen collaborative research groups with faculty from western Canadian universities together with the UW, exposing our students to very broad interactions. Other PIMS related activities include an industrial problems workshop for graduate students (one was held on the UW campus), and the new Banff International Research Station. As a member of PIMS, we have additional opportunities to form workshop and invite our graduate students to BIRS.