Alumni News
Alumni Spotlight: Claire Hickey: Improving Mathematics Education & Student Support in Higher Education
I earned my BS degree in Mathematics with a minor in Applied Statistics back in 2020. I am now at Florida State in Tallahassee, working towards my PhD in Biomathematics!
As an undergrad, I partook in Dr. Wheeler’s “Big Problems” class, where my collaborators and I traveled to Shepherdstown, WV to present our findings at an MAA conference. I was also awarded the wonderful opportunities of working in the MAC and leading Algebra recitations as a UTA. Now that I’m in graduate school, all of these experiences still play an important role in my daily responsibilities. My participation in Dr. Wheeler’s class has helped me gain the valuable research & communication skills needed to conduct effective PhD research. Also, having gained a full year’s teaching experience as a TA, I have since developed an interest in improving mathematics education and student support in higher education. My dream job is to ultimately become a teaching professor, and I have many of my former professors (both within and outside of math) to thank for setting such a great example for me. At the moment, I am pursuing my doctoral research in reaction-diffusion models for patterns of brain development.
Alumni Spotlight: Katherine Rank: Finding New Challenges, From Actuarial Math to Analytics
Katherine graduated from the Pitt Math Department in 2020 with a bachelor's in actuarial math. Halfway through her degree, she realized that although she was passionate about some aspects, she didn't want to be an actuary. “I spent the latter half of my time at Pitt attempting to figure out what I did want to pursue,” she said.
During her junior year, a tip from a previous grad student led Katherine to a summer internship with a healthcare software company called Net Health. The work was in data analysis. Through that summer she says she was often overwhelmed by the abruptness of her career change, but she enjoyed the challenge.
“I don't think I would've gotten through those first few months without the study skills and background knowledge I gained from my classes,” Katherine said. She made it through those first few months and found that very few of her coworkers were in their original fields either. “That knowledge took away a lot of the anxiety, and with time I grew to love the role,” she said. “I got a full-time job offer post-graduation and am still happily working in their analytics department today."
Alumni Q&A: Rachel Chiquoine: From Math to Disaster Management to Transportation Planning
What led you to pursue a PhD in Disaster management?
I was interested in how transportation systems drive our entire society (pun intended): it's how every single product and person gets to their destination. The transportation system is also vulnerable to disasters, climate change, and aging infrastructure. Emergency management provides a framework to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from natural and man-made disasters. I wanted to learn more about applying emergency management to transportation, so I got my PhD at the University of Delaware Disaster Science and Management program.
Why did you decide to go into transportation planning?
I performed a lot of strategic transportation planning at my first job at the U.S. Department of Transportation. I loved it - transportation planning is about talking to communities, defining their mobility needs and wants, and then recommending how state and local transportation agencies can make a safer, equitable, resilient, and accessible transportation system for everyone. Now I work at Cambridge Systematics, focusing on safety, strategic, and long-range planning.
How did your education at Pitt help you?
I appreciate that my math degree gave me underlying logical and critical thinking skills that I could apply to other topics. It was good training to derive solutions using a set of foundational tools. I liked Optimization and Graph Theory best, I think they describe the interconnections of transportation not only in terms of network connectivity (like a road map) but also how the transportation system is interdependent with other systems like telecommunications, electricity, utilities, or supply chains.
What did you like about studying at Pitt?
I loved hanging out in the Thackeray math lounge with my friends and doing our homework. I also loved how Pitt was in the middle of this awesome city with so much to do and see.
Alumni Colloquium/Career Panel
On October 7, the department held a Career Panel Event, where five Pitt PhD graduates in various stages of their careers, both in industry and academia, participated and presented career-related information. On the academic side, we hosted Dr. Justin Dunmyre, Interim Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Frostburg State University, and Dr. Scott Zimmerman, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Ohio State University at Marion. On the more industrial side, we hosted Dr. Saishuai Tang of Loomis, Saylers & Company, Dr. Ross Ingram of Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, and the recent graduate Dr. Elise Villella from Google.
From the career interests they had explored to the paths they took to arrive in their current professions, our alumni panelists shared how their experiences at Pitt have helped them to achieve professional and personal success and provided first-hand knowledge and candid advice on various career choices. Following the panel presentations, students and faculty engaged directly with alumni to ask questions according to their areas of expertise and interest.
Thank you to all of our panelists who volunteered their time to share their experiences and advice with our community. We’re truly grateful!
Painter Fellowship Project: Spotlight on Fireflies
On early summer nights, many of us appreciate the friendly glow of Pennsylvania’s state insect, the firefly Photinus pennsylvanica. It turns out that an even more remarkable firefly species, Photinus carolinus, can be found not only in the Smoky Mountains (hence its name) but also deep in the forests of northwestern PA. For her research as a 2021 Painter Fellow, 2022 mathematical biology graduate Maddie McCrea set her sights on this species and specifically on the unique tendency for swarms of these fireflies to flash in synchrony.
McCrea worked with Professors Bard Ermentrout and Jonathan Rubin to adapt a mathematical model, originally designed to capture an effect called “bursting” in neurons, to represent the bursts of flashes that P. carolinus fireflies omit. The team went on to study what would happen when many model fireflies were coupled together: under what conditions synchronization would develop, what other spatiotemporal patterns such as waves and spirals might be observed, and how these effects depend on parameters such as the density of fireflies within the swarm. Their work was published recently in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a high-profile journal at the interface of the physical and life sciences, and was featured in Popular Mechanics.
With her undergraduate degree – as well as a prestigious Department of Mathematics Culver Award -- under her belt, McCrea is now working in a research lab at Temple University in her hometown of Philadelphia, studying spinal cord injury and pain. She hopes to attend medical school in the near future.
The Painter Fellowship program supports undergraduates in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh to engage in summer research with faculty mentors. The program is supported by a generous donation from the Painter family.