Graduate students Anna Thomas (Pitt, Mathematics) and Matteo Martin (U. of Padova, Bioengineering) are the winners of the 2025 DSWeb Tutorial Award! This award is offered by the activity group on dynamical systems of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), for the creation of computational resources of significant use to the dynamical systems community. Mr. Martin came to the Pitt Department of Mathematics in September 2024 as a long-term visitor to undertake research with Professor Jonathan Rubin, who is Ms. Thomas’s PhD advisor. While at Pitt, Martin and Thomas began a collaboration that led to their development of their prize-winning package, XPPLORE. This toolbox automates the analysis and visualization of bifurcation diagrams and other information generated by the popular software XPPAUT, written by Professor Bard Ermentrout and used by researchers and students around the world.
Anna Thomas’s winning streak continued at the 2025 SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems in May 2025, where she was one of four winners of the “Red Sock” Prize for best student poster. Thomas’s poster, “Cellular and parkinsonian network dynamics in a conductance-based model of the pedunculopontine nucleus in rodents”, describes her doctoral thesis research modeling neurons that are believed to contribute to motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and that may be useful targets for therapies to fight the disease. The “Red Sock” Prize is named in honor of mathematician James Yorke of University of Maryland, a pioneer in chaos theory who is known for his iconic red socks and who initiated the prize at an earlier SIAM dynamical systems meeting.
Congratulations, Anna!!