REU students, mentor reunite at SACNAS

Summer REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) participants Shanise Walker (University of Georgia), Sijing Shao (ISU), Angie Gonzalez (Whittier College) and Anna Cepek (Bethany Lutheran College) caught up with REU mentor Kim Ayers at the recent SACNAS national conference in San Jose. That's not all they did:

Walker, Gonzalez, Cepak and George Shakan (WPI) presented posters at SACNAS on the research they did while participating in ISU's Summer 2011 REU program, winning two of the three awards made at the conference for best mathematics poster. Walker and My Huynh (Arizona State) won one for their poster, Propagation time for zero forcing of a graph, and Shakan for his poster, Automorphism groups of directed strongly regular graphs.

Another REU student, Chetak Hussein (Berkeley), won the contest "Who wants to be a mathematician?" while Xavier Garcia (U Minn) and Shakan were finalists, i.e., half the finalists were from ISU math REU!

While sessions and activities sent them different directions, meal breaks provided ample time for "helpful, face-to-face discussion of summer work," reported Ayers.

Others attending SACNAS include post doc Michael Young, graduate students Juan Brandi, Jason Ekstrand, Jesus Martinez, Saulo Orizago and Jose Ponce, and summer REU participant Nathan Meyers (Bowdoin), and ISU undergraduate math major Derek Young (presented poster on his summer REU work at North Carolina State U).