REU Participants Receive National Fellowships

We are excited to congratulate Manuel Santana and Katie Keegan, who participated in our program in the summer of 2021, on winning nationally-competitive scholarships that will accelerate enhance their graduate school career.

Manuel Santana, a 2021 Goldwater Scholar, who graduated with a BA in Computational Mathematics from Utah State University was awarded a prestigious scholarship through the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Besides his research on computational methods that accelerate the reconstruction of computed tomography on our site, he also worked on combinatorics, and shared many tutorials for solving algebra problems. He will join Cal Tech for his PhD.

Katie Keegan was offered not only an NSF GRFP but also a [Computational Science Graduate Fellowship by the US Department of Energy]0(https://www.krellinst.org/csgf/), which she accepted. Katie completed her BS in Applied Mathematics at Mary Baldwin College this spring and participated in two REUs. In the summer of 2020, she was part of ICERM’s REU and published a paper on a modified watermarking scheme based on the SVD, which was later also featured in SIAM News. On our site she developed a tensor SVD-based classification algorithm for fMRI data. We are extremely delighted that Katie will join our Computational Mathematics PhD program starting this fall.