** Saturday's events will be in room B107 in Van Vleck Hall. See Travel for parking and location details. **

8:30-9am: Refreshments & Welcome

Section NExT-WI Director Caitlyn Booms from Mount Mary University

9-10am: The Oz of Academe: A Journey of Brains, Heart, and Courage (slides, essay form of talk, book list)

Invited Speaker Matt DeLong from UW-Madison

Starting a new academic career can feel like stepping onto the Yellow Brick Road—an exciting journey with many unforeseen twists and turns. In a climate where higher education is increasingly under fire, finding purpose and balance can seem more challenging than ever. In this plenary, I'll draw on my own winding path of over 25 years as a PUI faculty member, department chair, and teaching-and-learning professional to offer perspective and invite reflection on your road ahead. We'll use the classic tale of Oz as a framework for building a thriving career. We’ll explore the brains of reflective and evidence-based teaching and assessment, the heart of building community and finding beauty in our discipline, and the courage to balance competing demands and navigate challenge and change. Your journey, like Dorothy's, will be shaped and enriched by the companions you find along the way. This talk will emphasize the importance of building professional friendships and a supportive network. Having recently started a new journey myself, I'm experiencing the same mix of excitement and anxiety you may feel. My goal is to share practical strategies and hard-won wisdom to help you truly find your way "home" to a sustainable and joyful professional life.

10-10:30am: Coffee Break

10:30-10:55am: A Friendly Introduction to Standards-Based Grading (slides)

Caitlyn Booms from Mount Mary University

I will discuss my experiences using standards-based (or mastery-based) grading in my math classes at Mount Mary University. We recently overhauled our introductory college algebra sequence, which now uses a mastery-based grading scheme, and I have used a similar scheme in my calculus I and II courses as well. My goal is to provide some insight on what standards-based grading is, discuss some of the pros and cons I've experienced while using it so far, and start a conversation about how to incorporate such a grading scheme in your courses.

11:05-11:30am: Active Learning Activities used to Engage Future Teachers (slides, handout)

Camille Schuetz from UW-Platteville

Teaching a general education mathematics course for future educators offers an opportunity to help students understand not just how mathematics works, but why it works. I enjoy designing hands-on activities that allow students to explore concepts deeply and develop the confidence to explain them to others. In this talk, I will share effective, classroom-tested activities that promote conceptual. Participants will leave with adaptable ideas for engaging students in discovering mathematical concepts through active exploration.

11:40am-12:05pm: On tail inference in scale-free inhomogeneous random graphs (slides)

Daniel Cirkovic from Marquette University

Both empirical and theoretical investigations of scale-free network models have found that large degrees in a network exert an outsized impact on its structure. However, the tools used to infer the tail behavior of degree distributions in scale-free networks often lack a strong theoretical foundation. In this talk, we introduce a new framework for analyzing the asymptotic distribution of estimators for degree tail indices in scale-free inhomogeneous random graphs. Our framework leverages the relationship between the large weights and large degrees of Norros-Reittu and Chung-Lu random graphs. In particular, we determine a rate for the number of nodes $k(n) \rightarrow \infty$ such that for all $i = 1, \dots, k(n)$, the node with the $i$-th largest weight will have the $i$-th largest degree with high probability. Such alignment of upper-order statistics is then employed to establish the asymptotic normality of three different tail index estimators based on the upper degrees.

12:15-1:45pm: Lunch (not included)

Small groups will head to various local restaurants

1:45-2:10pm: A Coinfection Model of Dengue Fever and Bacterial Meningitis (slides)

Tom Stojsavljevic from Beloit College

Coinfections involving bacterial meningitis and dengue fever pose complex challenges for disease control, particularly in tropical regions where both pathogens are endemic. This study develops and analyzes a nonlinear compartmental model describing the dynamics of co-circulating bacterial meningitis and dengue fever within a human–vector population. The model incorporates key biological processes such as direct transmission of meningitis, vector-borne transmission of dengue, and interactions arising from coinfection, including altered susceptibility, recovery, and mortality rates. We derive the basic reproduction numbers for each disease and establish conditions for local stability of the disease-free using next-generation matrix methods. Our results reveal parameter regions where one infection facilitates or suppresses the other, offering insight into potential synergistic or antagonistic interactions between meningitis and dengue. These findings underscore the importance of integrating vector control and vaccination efforts to mitigate the overall disease burden. The model provides a theoretical framework for understanding the epidemiological consequences of coinfection and highlights the need for coordinated surveillance in regions vulnerable to overlapping bacterial and vector-borne epidemics.

2:20-2:45pm: Developing Inquiry-Based, Narrative Modules for Data Driven Courses (slides)

Katherine Harris from Beloit College

We will discuss work over the past year to create visualizations and applications that connect theoretical knowledge to relevant concepts beyond the classroom in college-level math and statistics courses. Especially in a post-Covid world, educators must innovate new ways to drive interest and collaboration for learners with increasingly diverse backgrounds and future goals. This project aims to engage these students with a three-pronged approach: (1) Integrating technology to create interactive activity-based learning, 2) incorporating narrative structures into applications to provide context and drive interest, and (3) utilizing real-world data that is accessible and relevant to students. We will show progress and preliminary class testing results on two activities we have created: Roller Coaster Creation (game-based) and SIR Model Exploration (narrative-based). This work is in collaboration with Tyler George (Cornell College), Shonda Kuiper (Grinnell College), and Brittney Miller (Coe College), under the funding of a Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) program grant from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest.

2:55-3:20pm: Lambda Exponential Family of Distributions with Properties and Applications (canceled)

Shahid Mohammad from UW-Oshkosh

This research introduces a new family of probability distributions called the lambda exponential (LE) family. These distributions are constructed by multiplying an exponential density function with a continuous cumulative distribution function. A key motivation is obtaining closed-form solutions for the moment-generating function. Various mathematical properties of the LE family are investigated. As a specific case, the inverse Gaussian (IG) cumulative distribution function is used to derive the lambda exponential inverse Gaussian (LE-IG) distribution and study its characteristics. Performance of maximum likelihood estimation is assessed through simulations using the quantile function. To demonstrate flexibility and applicability, the LE family is fitted to two real datasets and compared to other distributions via likelihood methods.

3:30-4pm: Spring Event Discussion