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Prior to joining Wheaton College MA as the Sciences and Math Liaison, Jillian Amaral earned a degree in Biology, with a minor in Chemistry, from Mount Holyoke College. She worked as a molecular and cell biology scientist, in both academic and industry settings as a first career. Jillian then earned a MSLIS from Simmons College with a focus on Science reference, and made the transition to Library and Information Sciences, while working in the pharmaceutical industry.
I am Amanda Beecher, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Ramapo College of New Jersey. I have always known that I wanted to be a math teacher since playing “math class” with my stuffed animals. I graduated from University at Albany, SUNY with a BA in Mathematics and provisional certification to teach high school math. Several of my professors encouraged me to continue into graduate school, because they saw my potential as a mathematician as well as a teacher. I am deeply grateful for their guidance and support that resulted in me earning a PhD in Mathematics from University at Albany, SUNY. My thesis work was in Combinatorial Commutative Algebra working on a combinatorial description of the Betti numbers of multigraded modules. Upon graduation, I took a 3-year post-doc position at the United States Military Academy at West Point. My mathematical interests broadened during this time to include math modeling. I now serve as the Deputy Director of the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) sponsored by COMAP, as well as a head judge and problem author for the Environmental Problem. I am active in the NJ Section of the MAA and am currently serving as the Vice Chair of Speakers. I am most proud to be a wife and mother of 3- and almost 2-year-old boys. Since having my boys, I rarely have down time, so conference travel has been key to connecting with colleagues.
I’m Rachelle DeCoste, CaMeW founder and director. While an undergraduate math major at Connecticut College I discovered that I loved teaching people (especially the math-phobic and the math-haters) math. During my time as a graduate student at UNC, Chapel Hill I focused on developing myself as an educator as well as a researcher. My main goals when I first applied for jobs out of grad school were to find a job where I was allowed (encouraged even!) to develop as a teacher (the researcher bit was assumed) and to move closer to family in New England. It turned out that the best fit for me was a teaching postdoc at the United States Military Academy, West Point. After a year, I switched to a more research-oriented postdoc and spent another 2 years there before leaving to become an Assistant Professor at Wheaton College (MA). In addition to teaching, I research geometric properties of manifolds arising from 2-step nilpotent Lie groups. Since becoming an Associate Professor I have been working on many projects related to diversifying mathematics, including co-founding a 1-day Summit for Women in STEM at Wheaton and recently assuming the role of director of the MAA/Tensor Program for Women and Girls in mathematics. I am a Project NExT fellow, have been on AWM and AMS committees. Outside of work I am kept busy by my family which includes a 10-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter. I love to bake cookies!
My name is Sarah Ann Stewart Fleming and I have been a part of CaMeW since its founding in 2007. I am an associate professor of mathematics at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Belmont University is a comprehensive liberal arts university with approximately 8000 students. I have taught at Belmont for thirteen years. Prior to coming to Belmont, I taught at North Central College (a liberal arts college of about 2500 students) in Naperville, IL for four years. I received my Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in the area of operator theory. I am a member of Project NExT (forest dot) and was a board member for the Young Mathematicians Network. I have worked with the MAA Committee on Graduate Students to provide “job search” – related panels and workshops at national meetings and served on the national Joint Committee on Employment Opportunities in Mathematics. One of my most recent projects involves coordinating a workshop for graduate students at MAA section meetings. I have two boys (ages 3 and 5).
Janice Gifford received her EdD from the UMASS School of Education, specializing in statistics and educational measurement. She joined the Math-Stat department at Mount Holyoke in 1984, teaching primarily statistics courses. She served two terms as department chair, served as Associate Dean of Faculty & Director of Institutional Research (1991-98), Acting Provost (Fall,1994 & Fall1995), Class dean (Fall 2005), and Associate Dean (Spring 2013-Fall 2014). She was involved in REU's and an early version of an interdisciplinary QR course.
My name is Helen G. Grundman and I’m the Director of Education and Diversity at the American Mathematical Society. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love both math and teaching. (I do recall saying that I wanted to grow up to be an “arithmetic teacher.”) After graduating with a BS in Math and Psychology with secondary teaching credentials, I taught high school for a few years. It was a friend of mine who convinced me to go to graduate school by arguing that mathematics needs more women role-models. I completed my PhD at UC Berkeley and was a Moore Instructor at MIT before finding a home at Bryn Mawr College where I did research, taught, advised, and mentored for 25 years. My research is mainly in algebraic number theory, but spans some other areas of number theory, along with some topics in inverse Galois theory. I love teaching algebra at any level, basic math or statistics to math-phobes, and problem solving and proof-writing. (Actually, I enjoy teaching almost anything!) I spent many years running Bryn Mawr College’s MA and PhD programs, advising each of the students until they connected with a research advisor. I have a habit of mentoring most anyone I come across. (Be warned!) In 2017, I won the Association for Women in Mathematics’ Gweneth Humphreys Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. At the AMS, my focus is on diversifying mathematics at the graduate level, but I know that a key part of the process is diversifying the professoriate…and that is where CaMeW comes in! The other thing to know about me is that I love puzzles and games, though I don’t really like being competitive, and that my husband and I enjoy making fancy desserts.
My name is Laura Hall-Seelig and I am an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Merrimack College, a moderately sized college in northeastern Massachusetts. I’ve been at Merrimack for nine years now and just finished my first sabbatical semester. I received tenure and my promotion to Associate Professor at the end of 2014. I did my undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr College, double majoring in math and Italian. I knew that I wanted to teach math, but I wasn’t sure what to do with my life beyond that, so I taught at a private girls’ high school in Villanova, PA, for the first year after graduation. During that year, I realized how much I missed working with deeper mathematics, so (with encouragement from my professors) I headed back to school. I received my MA in Mathematics from Bryn Mawr and my Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). From there, I went straight to my position at Merrimack. My research is in number theory. I am a Project NExT Fellow (green 09 dot). During the summer of 2008, I was a participant in the second CaMeW. This will be my fourth time returning since then. I have a five-year-old daughter and a son who will be a year old at the end of this month.
I am Alanna Hoyer-Leitzel. I just finished my second year as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College. After I finished my PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2014, I knew I needed to expand my research interests to have a successful academic career. My first job out of grad school was a one-year research postdoc at Bowdoin College, where while I was still working in Dynamical Systems, but switched focus from the Hamiltonian n-vortex problem to thinking about resilience, disturbance, and ecological applications. A research-focused postdoc at a liberal arts college is a little different, and I realized my temperament is well suited for liberal arts and that I want to work at a school with a smaller department where research is highly valued, but so are the students. I started really focusing my job applications on liberal arts colleges. I ended up turning down a three-year visiting position elsewhere for a one-year visiting position at Mount Holyoke where there was no chance of extending the position, but I was “welcome to apply for tenure-track position next year.” I made this choice on the small but important point that the people I met while interviewing were people I was excited to work with (which was not the case for the other offer I had). I really like working at Mount Holyoke, and I guess they like me, because I got one of those tenure-track positions! I’ve done Project NExT and an AMS MRC week, both of which greatly influence me as a mathematician. I’m an avid cross-stitcher and I have a lot of plants at home.
Hi, I’m Reva Kasman, and I’m an associate professor of mathematics at Salem State University in Massachusetts. SSU is a medium-sized comprehensive institution with a significant commuter-based population and many first generation college students. It is primarily an undergraduate school, but the math department also has part-time graduate programs, including a masters degree for middle school mathematics teachers. I came to SSU in 2007, after 5 years in a tenure track position at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. While the job at GVSU was an excellent match for me professionally, eventually I came to the realization that the school’s location was compromising my life outside of work. I decided to leave GVSU (a year before tenure) and found the job Salem State just outside of Boston, which was a better fit all around. My PhD is from the University of Illinois at Chicago and my thesis was on Geometric Group Theory. However, my passion was always more about teaching, and over time my professional work has become exclusively focused on the scholarship of teaching and projects related to K-8 education. Since 2014 I have also taught in the summer at BEAM, an advanced mathematics enrichment camp for 7th graders from low-income households.
I’m Jennifer Koonz. After completing my PhD in the field of Schubert Varieties at UMass Amherst in 2013, I changed my trajectory entirely and took a software developer position in Cambridge, MA. I was relatively new to software and coding, so this move felt very risky. Luckily, my academic training had given me all the tools I needed to learn and thrive in the world of coding. Five years into my non-academic life, I am still very happy in my position and in my professio
Annie Raymond is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Originally from Montreal, she studied math and music at MIT as an undergrad before pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Technische Universitaet in Berlin and a postdoc at the University of Washington. At any given moment, you will most likely find her thinking about extremal graph theory and sums of squares---perhaps while riding her bicycle or playing the piano---or reflecting on education in prisons, on how to increase diversity in STEM and on how to bake the perfect sourdough. Annie also runs the instagram feed _forall.
Margaret Robinson, Adams Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College, received her B.A from Bowdoin College in 1979 and her Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in 1986. Before coming to Mount Holyoke College, she taught for one year at Hampshire College. Her research interests are in number theory, especially p-adic analysis and local zeta functions. Most recently she has been working with Joshua Holden and Pamela Richardson on understanding the behavior of some functions that are used in various cryptosystems. Margaret conducted her first summer REU program during the summer of 1992 and in 1997 her department jointly co-authored the book "Laboratories in Mathematical Experimentation: A Bridge to Higher Mathematics" using materials from the course that had already become central to the Mount Holyoke Mathematics major. During the summers of 2009, 2011, and 2013, she taught in the Summer Mathematics Program (SMP) at Carleton College which was run by Deanna Haunsberger and Stephen Kennedy. Her experiences working with REU students, teaching the laboratory class, and teaching at SMP have been central to her growth as a teacher of mathematics. In 2013, Margaret was awarded the Haimo Award from the MAA for Distinguished Teaching of Mathematics. She has been chair of her department for two terms and has served for one year as interim chair of the Computer Science Department at Mount Holyoke.
Amanda Ruiz is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of San Diego. She arrived at USD after a teaching and research postdoc at Harvey Mudd College in the Mathematics Department. She received her PhD in mathematics from Binghamton University under the advisement of Laura Anderson. While at Binghamton University, she started the Graduate Women's Organization to help women support each other in the academic environment. She also served as president of the Binghamton University Parent's Collective, an organization aimed at creating a community of graduate students who are juggling school and children. Amanda received a Masters degree in Mathematics from San Francisco State University, where she started the student group Mathematistas, which created a network of female graduate students in mathematics. Amanda enjoys doing research in combinatorics. Previous research has been in enumerative combinatorics and matroid theory. She especially enjoys doing research with undergraduate students. She is committed to making mathematics more accessible for women and students of color and considers service in this area an integral part of her job as an educator and academic.
Jessica Sidman is a Professor of Mathematics on the John S. Kennedy Foundation at Mount Holyoke College. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2002. One of her undergraduate mentors encouraged her to study algebraic geometry in graduate school because he thought studying it would give broad mathematical training that could provide strong background for many different directions. Since then, Jessica has worked on problems in areas including commutative algebra, combinatorics, and rigidity theory, so it seems like that was good advice! She is enjoying life post-tenure, using the freedom to help a student curate an exhibit in the art museum, work on developing new courses, and fulfilling some bucket list dreams (dancing as a snowflake in a recent local Nutcracker).
I am Nessy Tania from Smith College, another liberal arts college for women in Western Massachusetts. I attended CaMeW in 2008 and it was one of the most impactful workshops for my career. I hope all the participants will walk away with more knowledge, connections, and empowerment to accomplish all that need to be done in their last year of graduate school. I started my math career as a math major at the University of California, Davis where I discovered the possibility of combining mathematics with my deep interests in biology. My current research broadly spans different areas in mathematical biology. I went on and pursued my Ph.D. at University of Utah followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia, Canada. I started at Smith about six years ago and am currently applying for tenure (fingers crossed!). I am also an avid knitter and recently won Best in Show at the Massachusetts Sheep and Woolcraft Festival.
Suzanne Weekes is a Professor of Mathematical Sciences at WPI. She is a co-director of PIC Math http://www.maa.org/picmath and serves as the Chair of the Education Committee of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
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