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An intense 8-week summer program for undergraduate students will be run at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, for three years: 2022, 2023, and 2024. Research topics in six different fields of contemporary pure and applied mathematics will be offered. Each year, two research topics will be advertised and a total of 12 undergraduates will be recruited nationwide. The projects will come from hot research areas where a lot of exploration is yet to be done. This will enable the undergraduates to exploit their creativity and advance knowledge in the corresponding fields. The REU program will start with two weeks of teaching the undergraduates the necessary background. Then each team of six undergrads will be split into a few subgroups to work on specific projects within each topic. Each team will include a UMD graduate assistant who will help the faculty team leader mentor the undergrads. Besides technical training and research activities, the REU program will involve three weekly seminars: the Update Seminar where the undergrads will give oral presentations on their projects, the Exposure Seminar where professors from the UMD and nearby universities will give expository talks on their research, and the Lunchtime Workshop where topics such as how to apply for graduate schools and research fellowships, how to write a paper and give a talk will be discussed. The REU program will be concluded with the Symposium where each undergraduate participant will give a talk. Additionally, each undergrad will need to write a report that will be converted into a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. Selected participants will be given an opportunity to present their work in conferences such as the Joint Mathematics Meeting.

Summer 2022

REU 2022 team: (left to right) Channing Bentz (University of Nebraska), Dmitry Pinchuk (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Kausik Das (Harvey Mudd College), Shivam Mojite (Vanderbilt University), Daniel Yuan (Blair High School), Luke Triplett (Duke University), William Clark (Davidson College), Maria Cameron (the REU director, UMD), Madi Sousa (University of Denver), Luis Suarez (TA, UMD), Prisca Calkins (Towson University), Dario Cruzado Padro (University of Puerto Rico), Margot Yuan (TA, UMD), Amar Shah (UC Berkeley), Dennis Corraliza (University of Central Florida)

Senior and junior personnel

Masha Cameron, the REU program director, leader of Project 2, mariakc@umd.edu
Wojtek Czaja, the REU program co-director, czaja@umd.edu
Dio Margetis, leader of Project 1, diom@umd.edu
Luis Suarez, TA of Project 1, lcsuarez@umd.edu
Luke Evans, TA of Project 2, evansal@umd.edu
Margot Yuan, TA of Project 2, jyuan98@umd.edu

Schedule

Monday, June 13
Kick-off meeting, MATH 3206, 10 AM -- 12 PM. Slides
Weeks 1—2 (06/13—06/24):
Daily Tutorials/Computer Labs. Each REU student is expected to choose a particular project by themed of Week 2.
Weeks 3—8 (06/27 — 08/05):
- Working on particular projects
- Monday: Lunchtime Workshop (12--1 PM, MATH lounge)
- Wednesday: Exposure Seminar (2–3 PM, MATH3206)
- Friday: Update Seminar (1:30—3:30 PM, MATH3206)
Wednesday, August 3:
Poster Competition
Friday, August 5:
Symposium

Lunchtime Workshop

Mondays, 12--1 PM, MATH lounge

June 27: How to give a talk
July 18: How to apply to a graduate school and for graduate research fellowships
July 25: (a) How to apply to a graduate school. (b) How to prepare a poster and write the final report.

Exposure Seminar

Wednesdays, 2--3 PM, MATH 3206

June 29: Yanir Rubinstein, Convexity, positivity, and some tales on mentoring research
July 6: Haizhao Yang, Solving Forward and Inverse Problems Using Reinforcement Learning
July 13: Wojtek Czaja, Harmonic Analysis meets ML CANCELED
July 20: Stuart Antman, The PDEs of continuum physics: the virtue of ignorance
July 27: Deep Ray, Deep Learning aided Bayesian inference
August 3: Jonathan Rosenberg, The mathematics of crystals and quasicrystals

Update Seminar

Fridays, 1:30--3:30 PM, MATH 3206

The REU students will give 15-minute talks on their projects
In each seminar, 2—4 students from each group will speak
Each REU student is expected to give at least two talks besides the Symposium

Poster Competition

Wednesday, August 3, Rotunda

Each research mini-team working on a particular project is expected to present a poster
Graduate students not involved in the REU will judge the poster competition

Posters

Amar Shah and Channing Bentz: "Optimal Controllers for Stochastic Systems"
Daniel Yuan: "Approximating the dynamics of a periodically driven Duffing Oscillator with white noise by a Markov chain"
Dario Cruzado and Madison Sousa: "Plasmonics at the macroscale and microscale"
Dennis Corraliza and Shivam Mohite: "Geometric aspects of a fluid model for electrons"
Kausik Das: "Dipole excitations for hydrodynamic electrons in graphene"
Luke Triplett, William Clark, and Dmitry Pinchuk: "Neural network approaches for the committor problem"
Prisca Calkins: "Neural networks case study: Face potential"

Winners: Dario Cruzado and Madison Sousa.
Runner-up: Kausik Das.

Symposium

Friday, August 5, MATH 3206

Each REU student will give a 20-minute talk: what project she/he was working on, what did she/he learn, what are the research results

Final Report

Due Day: Friday, August 5

Each REU student is expected to write a report on her/his work.
This report can be a draft of a paper, a research write-up, or a summary of what the student has learned.

Outdoor adventures

A hike in the Great Falls park, the Billy Goat Trail, June 26, 2022

Great Falls, MD, Scenic Outlook
Great Falls, MD, Billy Goat Trail

Design by Michelle Cameron

Maria K. Cameron

University of Maryland, Department of Mathematics

Research Experience for Undergraduates

Modern topics in pure and applied mathematics

The UMD website for the REU