Research in the Classroom

For the past ten years, I have been developing a teaching methodology that integrates authentic research activities directly into classroom activities, thereby exposing students to the mathematical science research enterprise early in their college years. Specifically, I developed a Linear Algebra course and a Graph Theory course that have built-in research components to give a much larger than usual number of students a taste of research within the course itself. Students undertake a term project with the following goals:

1. Students develop expertise in a set of techniques for analyzing data;

2. Students learn the mathematics underlying the techniques in a rigorous manner;

3. Students understand how the data drives the mathematics and vice-versa;

4. Students connect mathematics to a modern pressing real-world issue by analyzing data and making decisions about a societal issue that matters to them;

5. Student's communicate their analysis to a general audience.

Below is a list of undergraduate research projects I supervised where students did a varying amount of research. Most did original projects on applications of mathematics of interest to them, gathering and analyzing data using the methods learned in class. A few read and synthesized papers and these are marked as “reanalysis.” I've given several talks on this approach to integrating research with teaching, all listed on the "Communications" page. Let me know if you would like to hear about it.

Spring 2019

Kenji Coleman-Yamada: Network analysis of Chinese language compound words

Spring 2018

• Wendy Chen: Paris 2E Network

• Michael Crowder: Passing Effect on Basketball

• Erica Guaman-Garcia: Graph Theory analysis of my Instagram network

• Jordyn Green: Connections between Cartoons

• Avery Jiang: Madrid Train Bombing Terrorist Network (reanalysis)

• Peisi Li: Network Analysis of the movie Love Actually

• Yvonne Lin: Social Network of Gervy’s Zebra (reanalysis)

• You Jun Liang: CP Air Route Map (reanalysis)

• Reem Saad: Romeo and Juliet's Social Network

• Anthony Juarez: Connections in the Game

• Izabella Pinkovskaya: Network of Thrones

• Xioli Tang: A Postman’s Connection

• Chinwei Wang: Network of Visa Free Countries

• Ashlina Wang: TED Talks Connection

• Lizabeth Yagupolskiy: Grey’s Anatomy Network

Fall 2017

• Mary Anna Kivenson: Centrality measures of internal migration (Honors Thesis)

• Maniza Pritila: Using graph theory to analyze student performance

• Max Shteyman: Best measures for Supreme Court landmark decisions

• Robert Wagner: Social analysis of Yelp data

Fall 2014

• Graham Beekman: Vaccination Strategies with centrality measures

• Rivka Morosow: Centrality Analysis of Manhattan Road Networks

• Anastasia Naderiants: Centrality measures of book-crossing network

Spring 2013

• Jean Marc Cadet: Centrality in Criminal Networks

• Jeremy Mezarina: Morphological Variability in Biology (reanalysis)

• Cori Mizrahi: Homophily in Social Networks

• Oluwakemi Omotunde: Protein-Protein Interaction Network (reanalysis)

• Lexi René: Cascading Failure in the Power Grid (reanalysis)

• Michael Squitieri: Centrality Measures in the Wikipedia Mathematics Network (Presented at the Council for Undergraduate Research Conference in April 2014.)

Spring 2012

• Nina Berstein: Place-Rated Data in Sociology (reanalysis)

• Jessica Dorismond: Vendor Selection in Business Management

• Nkaa Esprit: Asset Allocations in Quantitative Finance (reanalysis)

• Richard Gerlach: Analyzing data from the World Bank using multivariable regression techniques

• Daavid Moseley: Sunspot Data in Astronomy

• Michelle Herssein: Baby Weight Analysis

• Qiang Wang: Impact of the 1952 Mine Safety Act on mine fatalities (reanalysis)

• Linlin Zheng: Water quality in Environmental Science

• Chunmei Zhu: Satisfaction Research in Marketing

Spring 2011

• David Herssein: Image Compression using the Singular Value Decomposition

• Stan Kats: Quadratic Forms and the Fifteen Theorem (reanalysis)

• Adil Billa: An application of PCA to US Swap Interest Rates

• Konstantin Andrianov: Latent Semantic Indexing

• Oscar Perez: Principle Component Analysis in Gene Expression (reanalysis)