Undergraduate Mentoring
I have been lucky to work on research questions with some wonderful undergraduates. Most recently, I led a project for two months at the 2024 Iowa State Math REU. Our group (pictured here illustrating some maximal independent sets on a 2x3 grid) studied statistics of maximal independent sets on grid-like graphs. We are currently finishing up a paper on this work, but already have a great poster summarizing some of our results!
Poster.pdfGraduate Mentoring
I also count many current graduate students among my favorite collaborators. I recently participated as a postdoctoral mentor in the 2024 Graduate Research Workshop in Combinatorics, an intensive workshop where graduate students can work in small research groups with postdocs and faculty. I led a group working on rainbow Turán numbers for brooms.
I also co-mentored the Spring 2024 RTG graduate research group at Iowa State, on rainbow saturation problems.
Outreach
I think the best outreach activities combine serious math with something fun. Here are a couple of recent highlights.
I co-organized and co-presented the inaugural Pi Day Marathon Lecture in 2023: a 24 hour, non-stop livestream lecture covering the contents of an entire discrete math course. (Here I am at 6:30 am, 2.5 hours into a 6 hour graph theory lecture.) This was so popular that we did it again in 2024! Viewers have included colleagues, students, friends, high school classes, and at least one five year old. In case we manage to pull this off yet again in 2025, we stream our marathons here.
I also recently helped to plan Iowa State's Sonia Kovalevsky Day, 2024, and presented an activity there. This is an event designed to engage middle school students, primarily girls, in fun and creative mathematical activities. For my activity, we explored game theory by playing Hex.
I was a 2022-23 Bertha Morton Award winner, which is a university-wide graduate scholarship at the University of Montana. Associated with this award, I was featured on the Confluence podcast, which shares stories about research and academic life. You can hear my episode here.
