This REU site award provides support for ten undergraduate researchers working under the supervision of several faculty advisors. The program runs for eight weeks as a combination of individualized research projects, usually one student with one researcher and short courses on material not normally found in the undergraduate curriculum. A faculty seminar with talks on research interests is scheduled to broaden student perspectives. A strong cooperative effort with the Mathematical Sciences Section of Oak Ridge National Laboratory includes some teaching of the short courses and the direction of student projects by mathematical researchers at the laboratory. Research projects will cover areas such as applying optimal control to population models with particular applications to competitive systems, predator-prey models and bioremediation strategies. Other work will focus on the application of statistical decision theory to analyze alternative partitioning patterns of limited nutrients to root and shoot tissue, on the size of minimal generating sets for finitely generated ideals of commutative rings and development of numerical algorithms which operate with some type of parallelism.
