This award provides support for the Modern Mathematics Workshop, which will be held in conjunction with the 2010 SACNAS National Conference in Anaheim, California, on September 29-30, 2010. The award provides partial support of faculty and post-docs to participate in a two-day workshop which describes the mathematical underpinning of the upcoming 2011-2012 year programs at a consortium of US- based Mathematics Institutes. The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM), the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), the Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI), and the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) have all agreed to host the two-day workshop. By joining together, they aim to make the Workshop attendees feel welcome to participate in their programs, and become familiar with all the opportunities that the Mathematics Institutes offer.
The Workshop will also feature a speaker who will address the underrepresented minority undergraduates in a three-hour mini-course. The speaker will encourage students to see the various ways in which mathematics acts as the glue among the STEM sciences.
Modern Math workshop. Around 190 undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs and faculty participated in the Modern Math Workshop, a preconference of the SACNAS conference. The conference took place at the Anaheim Convention center in Anaheim, California over two days. The first day took place from 12:30-8 pm. We had two sessions. One session was a mini-course. Presented by Juan Restrepo, University of Arizona, Title: Introduction to Deterministic and Stochastic Time Dependent Inverse Problems The majority of the undergraduate students and some graduate students ( around 103) participated in the mini-course. The second session consisted of a panel discussion by the NSF program directors discussing the opportunities at NSF followed by four expository talks by speakers designated by IMA, PCMI, MBI, and MSRI. The talks were given by speakers, each of whom, had some kind of connection with each of the seven institutes. Around 50 people participated in the presentation session. This year we also included a keynote speaker, Guillermo Sapiro, University of Minnesota who addressed both groups. His topic was "Image processing: Math travels to Hollywood, the hospital, and Mars", and was well received by the students and the faculty. The second day, 8:30 am -12:30 am , consisted of a second Mini-course. Presented by Reinhard Laubenbacher, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. Title: Mathematics and the Systems Biology of Cancer and three more talks by the speakers representing NIMBIOS, IPAM and SAMSI and a panel discussion by the representatives of all eight institutes who were present. Each representative discussed the various activities and programs that are offered by their institutes. (Please see the schedule at www.mathinstitutes.org/diversity/sacnas.html).
