Math majors Ethan Ashby ’21, Pieter Derdyn ’16, and Elena Kim ’21 have won NSF Graduate Research Fellowships!
Ethan’s thesis on “Extracting hitherto unseen variant signals from the cancer genome using data de-sparsification strategies” came out of a Quantitative Summer Undergraduate Research Experience at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center during the summer of 2020. In the fall, Ethan will be headed to a PhD program in Biostatistics, although a final decision on which program is still forthcoming.
Pieter Derdeyn (2016) wrote his thesis on “An Elastic Model for Bacterial DNA Segregation” and worked for a biotech startup after graduating with a math degree from Pomona. Pieter is now in his second year as a student at UC Irvine in their Mathematical, Computational, and Systems Biology PhD program where he is applying his mathematical and computational interests to understanding neural circuits.
Elena Kim has published pure mathematics research from two previous REUs (at Michigan-Dearborn and Williams) and wrote her senior thesis on “Equivalence constants for generalized Frobenius norms,” a topic originating in the field of operator algebras. She will be attending the PhD program in mathematics at MIT.