The goal of this project is to transform doctoral training in the mathematical sciences to include activities that provide students with marketable skills and experiences. Prior to the start of formal thesis research, students will develop mathematical and statistical approaches to tackle problems arising in other areas of science and engineering. The 16 doctoral students supported by the project will spend two semesters of their second year working on an interdisciplinary research problem posed by an external partner from industry, a government lab, or a research institution. Students will work in teams consisting of 2-3 students, one mathematics and one statistics faculty mentor, and one of our external partners. These research projects will replace the students' normal teaching assistant duties in their second year and will provide exposure to the entire research process, from starting with an open-ended problem description to obtaining final results. In the summer after this year-long research experience, the students will be well positioned to continue work at the external partners' organizations as interns, thereby gaining experience that could ultimately lead to employment opportunities after graduation. Specific objectives include: (1) Broadening opportunities for students to pursue the solution of real-world application problems through connections with industrial and interdisciplinary researchers; (2) Increasing students' confidence to tackle applied problems with which they are not familiar; (3) Increasing students' ability to communicate within research teams and to wider audiences; (4) Broadening the range of career paths for mathematical sciences Ph.D. graduates, and increasing the number and proportion of students who do internships, take industrial research positions, or take postdoctoral positions at national labs. The teams will be chosen to include some students whose dissertation topics may not involve strong modeling or computational components. We will use the EDT project as a recruiting tool to increase the number of qualified U.S. students who apply to the Ph.D. program, especially women and under-represented minorities. The web site for the project is www.utdallas.edu/EDT.
Six external partners have agreed to collaborate on this project. In consultation with the external partners, we have developed broad research problems that complement the strengths of the faculty mentors at UTD. Proposed projects include (1) uncertainty quantification for microseismic source estimation in unconventional oil and gas recovery; (2) infectious disease forecasting; (3) cone beam computerized tomography to acquire patient anatomy data for cancer radiotherapy treatments; (4) multisensor tracking of multiple moving targets for defense applications; and (5) modeling of plasma processing systems for advanced manufacturing. Following an annual kick-off event, we will hold an in-depth workshop in which students and faculty will learn fundamental theory, examples, and computational skills of direct relevance for the chosen projects that year. The remainder of the year is broken into one- to four-month time periods during which the research goals will be defined, the problem prototyped and solved, and the results disseminated to the external partner and others outside the project.
