Mentoring

One of the things I enjoy most about my job is the opportunity to mentor students in research. While I am not at a point in my career where I can take students of my own yet, I have had a lot of experience mentoring students at all levels from undergraduate to PhD students. I am looking forward to being able to take students of my own soon.

The Illinois Geometry Lab (IGL)
https://math.illinois.edu/research/igl

The Illinois Geometry Lab’s mission is to enhance and support undergraduate research within the Department of Mathematics and to support departmental efforts to engage local, state and national communities through outreach. Through the IGL, I was the faculty mentor for four undergraduate research projects, each with 3-5 undergraduate students and a graduate team leader. This involved weekly meetings with the students, along with allowing the students constant access to me via email or by stopping by my office. Included in the links below are posters prepared for each group, along with a video presentation of the results we obtained, and also information about publications produced working with the IGL, where applicable.

  • IGL Project - Firefighters on Graphs
    Graduate Team Leader: Robert Krueger
    Undergraduate Participants:     Abdullah Dean, Tongyun Huang, Andy Lee, Mose Mizrahi, and Casey Wheaton-Werle
    Resulted in a publication in the journal Discrete Ap    plied Mathematics - ArXiv preprint here
    This group won the 2021 IGL Research Award - Awarded to the best IGL group from the 20-21 school year (best out of 22 groups), including a $500 prize for the undergraduate scholars.

  • IGL Project - Royal Colorings of Graphs
    Graduate Team Leader: Emily Heath
    Undergraduate Participants:     Maria Fedriko, Cindy Feng, Gargee Jagtap, Jaqueline Ortiz, and Suneal Tolliver

  • IGL Project - Game Theory with Arithmetic Progressions
    Graduate Team Leader: Felix Clemens
    Undergraduate Participants:     Albert Cao, Xiaojian Li, Tatum Schmidt, Leeann Xoubi, and Weian Yin
    Resulted in a manuscript which has been submitted for publication - ArXiv preprint     here

  • IGL Project - Saturation Problems for Paths in Hypergraphs
    Graduate Team Leader: Emily Heath
    Undergraduate Participants:     Ali Guo, Junsheng Liu, and Dipro Ray

The Graduate Research Workshop in Combinatorics (GRWC)
https://sites.google.com/view/grwc/workshop-locations/2019-lawrence-ks

The Graduate Research Workshop in Combinatorics is an annual two-week collaborative research workshop for advanced graduate students and postdocs from all areas of combinatorics. Participants work in small collaborative groups with faculty and postdocs on research problems from across the discipline. After attending GRWC twice as a graduate student (2016 and 2017), I went again in 2019 as a postdoctoral mentor. I was the mentor for two research groups, both of which ended up writing a paper, each which have been submitted for publication.