Mathematics, PhD, 2021
Who is your employer, and where are they located?
Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.
What is your job title and what kind of work does it involve?
Assistant Professor. My duties include research, teaching, and applying for grants. Research includes national and international collaborations, maintained through conferences and workshops.
What sparked your interest in your area of study?
I fell in love with mathematics in my Calculus class. My professor spent only about 10 minutes describing the real-world uses of Calculus for modeling of fluids (among other things, but fluids stuck out to me). This was solidified in my first internship with NASA's Montana Space Grant Consortium launching high-altitude balloons and predicting their path through the atmosphere, which motivated my honors undergraduate thesis project of modeling the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations using a central differencing scheme over some (very basic) topography.
What do you see as the value of your degree?
While I adore the beauty and power of mathematics, and even if I had never ended up doing it as a career, I wouldn't trade my PhD for the world. It taught me to think critically in ways I didn't even perceive possible as an already curious and skeptical young student. It has greatly enhanced my ability to pick apart arguments for the purpose of understanding in all areas of life. The difficulty I experienced in the program instilled in me a deep sense of humility and, later solidified in new ways at Caltech, respect for all the different ideas different people can bring to solve a problem.
Were there any other people, activities, or events from your time at UNL that helped you get to where you are now?
My graduate advisor is a heavy contender for best advisor in the world. The value of a good advisor who is mindful and cares about their students is absolutely critical. I saw him exhibit this in everything I did: every conference I attended, how he pushed me with research, grants he taught me to apply to. I can only hope to be as good as him, and I strive to be every day for my students.
Tell us about the path you took to get to where you are today in your career and how you applied your education in your area of study to get here.
My path was, unusual. My parents homeschooled us by accident: they saw my (as the oldest child) curiosity to read because I saw them reading for work all the time. My siblings and I were in a variety of grade levels by the time kindergarten came around, and I completed pre-calculus at home by the age of 14. My mother, brilliant woman that she is, enrolled me in a program for high school students at our local college, where I took calculus among a number of other courses. In this class, as I said before, I fell in love with mathematics via its applications to understanding the real world.
Thanks to an incredible undergraduate advisor, I discovered graduate school existed, and applied to only a handful of graduate schools to see if I would get in. I chose to attend UNL after meeting who would end up being m! y graduat e advisor, Adam Larios. I ended up moving a lot and working on a number of projects, and was very blessed to be hired in two successive postdoc positions (one at the University of Victoria on a topic in math entirely new to me, and the other at Caltech) before being hired as a TT professor at Oregon State University.
What are your future professional goals?
My professional goals are to do math that changes the world, and to do it in a way that changes the world. I would like to remain a professor for the rest of my career.
