This proposal describes a Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling (GSMM) Camp, a one-week workshop to be held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and whose aim is graduate student education and career development directed towards modern scientific problem solving. Research in the Mathematical Sciences has become increasingly interdisciplinary requiring both depth in mathematics and the ability to understand and communicate across a variety of areas outside of mathematics. The GSMM Camp is designed to promote a broad range of problem-solving skills, including mathematical modeling and analysis, scientific computation, and critical assessment of solutions. The activities of the Camp are centered around a set of problems presented by invited faculty and industry mentors. These problems are to be highly interdisciplinary in nature, inspired by real problems that arise in industrial applications. The work on the problems is to be done by graduate student teams, each with the guidance of an invited mentor, so that scientific communication is an important and integral component of the work. In this way, the GSMM Camp will expose graduate students to real-world problems of current scientific interest and provide a valuable educational and career-enhancing experience outside the traditional academic setting. Accordingly, the main objectives of the GSMM Camp are to advance the problem-solving and scientific communication skills of the participating graduate students and to expose graduate students to a broad range of real problems of current scientific interest and potential areas for interdisciplinary research.
The proposal requests funds to hold three GSMM Camps, to be run annually, beginning in June 2004, during the week preceding the existing Mathematical Problems in Industry (MPI) Workshop. The plan is to coordinate the activities and problem-solving experience of the new GSMM Camp with those of the long-running MPI Workshop. Approximately 24 graduate students and 4 invited mentors will attend the Camp each year, and these participants will be invited to attend the MPI Workshop as well. The Camp, and the Workshop to follow, will promote both depth in mathematics and the ability to understand and communicate across a variety of areas of science and engineering, including, for example, nano and biotechnology, microelectronics and information technology, and fluid dynamics and heat transfer. As a result, the Camp-Workshop combination will provide a valuable experience that will have a strong impact on the interdisciplinary research efforts of the participating graduate students, and at the same time help promote connections and collaborations between future academic researchers and scientists in U.S. industries.
