GMU Wins Undergraduate Research Awards at JMM 2016
Three GMU mathematics majors received top honors for research at the 2016 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle, WA. The undergraduates were individual winners in the Mathematical Association of America Poster Competition at the conference held from Jan. 6-9. The JMM is the preeminent annual gathering of mathematicians from academics, government, and industry, which attracted over 6000 attendees this year.The Mason student researchers and their project titles were: Nathaniel Bechhofer, "Convergence of a job market signaling game with agent estimation of parameters to the Bayesian Nash equilibrium"; Harout Boujakjian, "Modeling the spread of Ebola with SEIR and optimal control"; and Ratna Khatri, "Consensus vs. fragmentation in a model of opinion dynamics."
George Mason University and UCLA were the only schools with three outstanding poster awards. Among other Virginia colleges, James Madison University and the College of William and Mary each had an award.
The three student researchers were among eight Mason undergraduates who presented mathematics research at the 2016 competition in Seattle. All eight are participants in the NSF-supported GMU EXTREEMS program for undergraduate research in computational and data-enabled mathematics. Prof. Maria Emelianenko of the Department of Mathematical Sciences is the program's director and principal investigator of the NSF grant.
