Undergraduate Research

Speaking from personal experience, research can be one of the most impactful and lasting experiences a student can have during their time as an undergraduate.   I am very excited to share some ideas for projects with interested students, and I am happy to talk about research opportunities any time!  You can find some sample ideas for projects below, but I would also love to hear about your interests and any ideas you might have. 

Current projects (as of March 2025):

• Affine combination isometries (with Willow Denker of Binghamton U, began May 2024) - when can you guarantee that a function on an arbitrary metric space with the property that certain weighted sums of distances are preserved will itself necessarily preserve distances?

• Harmonic content of string networks (with Miriam Abecasis of Monmouth U, began July 2024) - if a single taut string is plucked, we can hear the sound it makes and can therefore determine its harmonic spectrum.  What if two strings are somehow conjoined and then plucked?  What if it's three strings?  Mathematically we know what "should" happen.  Miriam obtained a research grant from ICUNJ to build an apparatus and test the theoretical model.

• Orbital detection (with Jason French and Felipe Marcal of Monmouth U, began January 2025) - suppose you live on a planet that you believe to be alone in its star system.  You calculate your planet's predicted orbit around its star and find that your planet is not precisely where it should be at any given time.  You conclude there must be another mystery planet in your star system.  Based on the deviations in your planet's predicted orbit, can you find the mystery planet?

Here are some PDFs of end-of-project reports that former students have written.