By ShaunMicheal Bartschi and Fiona Van Leeuwen
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way in which people around the world experience all sorts of everyday affairs, including conferences. But current conditions did not stop the Utah State University (USU) Student Chapter of SIAM from virtually hosting the SIAM Northern States Section Student Chapters (NSS-SC) Conference. The conference, which took place in mid-October, aimed to highlight the research of graduate and undergraduate students and build general presentation skills that students could apply at future conferences.
Conference attendees hailed from nine states and Ontario, Canada. Registration was free in order to eliminate financial constraints and encourage participation from students from various locations. Three plenary speakers and 20 presenters provided plenty of opportunities for engagement and learning f throughout the virtual event. The speakers also gained experience (many for the first time) in presenting their work digitally — a skill that is now a staple of research in the era of a pandemic.
Kezia Manlove of Utah State University delivered the first plenary talk on the evening of Friday, October 16. Manlove is an assistant professor in the Department of Wildland Resources. She holds a master’s degree in statistics from Montana State University and a Ph.D. in infectious disease dynamics from Penn State. Her presentation focused on leveraging methods from graph and information theory to better model the spatial and social dynamics of wildlife, with a special emphasis on improving forecasts of pathogen transmission.
Marylesa Howard, a scientist at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), gave the first of the two plenary talks on Saturday, October 17. Howard, who received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Montana in 2013, recently received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (presented by the White House). She spoke about the mathematical and statistical algorithms necessary for the computational imaging methods that the NNSS utilizes in experiments, and highlighted the accomplishments of graduate student interns.
Shuang Liu, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the final invited speaker. Liu received her Ph.D. in applied and computational mathematics from the University of South Carolina in 2019. Her talk addressed the use of computational methods to model the spread of invasive species in free boundary problems.
Overall, student presenters found the event to be very useful for building presentation skills, as many were first-time conference speakers. Both undergraduate and graduate students gave research talks that spanned 12 different research areas, from the analysis of partial differential equations to the life sciences. The NSS-SC conference took place primarily through the learning management system Canvas. Presenters submitted videos and abstracts for their talks, which conference attendees could view asynchronously. They could then engage in discussion posts after the talks. Preparation for the conference began in February; due to the quickly evolving pandemic, USU’s SIAM leadership decided to move the meeting online over the summer. This was the first time that any of the student chapter officers, as well as the advisor, had hosted a conference — much less an online one! Nevertheless, after some inevitable trial and error, the team felt that the first-ever NSS-SC Conference was a success.
Conference attendees could sign up to receive a free t-shirt and were treated to delivered pizza on Friday evening. Therefore, the pandemic did not stop participants from enjoying a socially distant meal with each other. While we continue to face the uncertainty of COVID-19, it is still important to gather together, even if only virtually.
The USU Student Chapter of SIAM would like to thank SIAM for their support; Kezia Manlove, Marylesa Howard, and Shuang Liu for delivering such wonderful talks; our presenters for sharing their research; and all of the attendees for participating.
ShaunMicheal Bartschi is a master’s student at Utah State University (USU) studying mathematics education. He is president of the USU Student Chapter of SIAM. Fiona Van Leeuwen is pursuing a bachelor's degree in chemistry with a minor in mathematics at USU. She is the social media coordinator of the USU Student Chapter of SIAM.