By Gabriel Renelt, Staff Writer
On Friday, Sept. 18, the math department held summer research presentations showcasing the work students had completed over the past summer. The event was open to all and began at 3:00 p.m. in Glatfelter Hall with an assortment of treats.
The presentation topics included:
“Mathematical Modeling of Bacterial Stress in Response to Food Availability and Biofilm Formation” by Nadia Janat & Adam Wolkowski
“Being a Technical Intern for the HR Team at Axtria” by Ellie Mandelberg
“A Search for Energetically Feasible Configurations in Cylindrically Confined Cholesteric Liquid Crystals” by Zarin Eshika
“Exploring Efficient Methods of Determining Minimum Sizes of Signed Sumsets” by Roland Stevens
Janat and Wolkowski completed their research by using Mathematics and computer simulations to detail how bacteria move around and stick together, especially when they have less food available. Their work is meant to predict when bacteria will swim freely or clump together, which helps understand things like infections and surface cleaning.
An interesting way in which Janat and Wolkowski presented their information was using visuals showcasing the movement of the bacteria under the influence of food.
Mandelberg’s project was centered on her internship with Axtria where she built programs to help the HR team perform more efficiently.
Mandelberg noted that the company experienced employee retention issues and also aimed to help the HR department address them. “It seemed like a lot of it was people didn’t feel connected. I felt that more frequent check ins would be beneficial to employee retention,” she said.
Eshika completed her research on how patterns form a type of material called cholesteric liquid crystals when they are squeezed into a cylinder. She used math to discover which patterns are possible.
When questioned on how she found her research opportunity, she gave advice to students saying, “it’s always harder to find research by email, but you have to have a lot of confidence in yourself… you can’t expect a reply from every email so just be confident in yourself and keep applying.”
Roland’s project focused on new formulas for a function that can calculate the sizes of sumsets more efficiently. The work he completed works to fill in the faps and make it easier for mathematicians to solve other related problems.
When asked, Stevens clarified and said, “we’re basically asking what is the smallest set of numbers we can pick so that, by adding and subtracting them in all possible ways we can get every number in the group.”
The event ended with all the participants being thanked for sharing their work with the attendees.
