REU Site: Appalachian Mathematics and Physics Site

Marshall University Research Corporation, Huntington WV

Investigators

Abstract

The Department of Mathematics and Physics at Marshall University will host an eight-week REU Site during Summers 2024 through 2026. The program has five main objectives: half of participants will attend university in the Appalachian region, participants will obtain useful skills in communicating and collaborating on mathematics and physics projects, the program will produce high quality research on a variety of mathematics and physics topics, participants will achieve gainful employment in a STEM-adjacent career or attend graduate school, and at least 40% of participants will attend graduate school or work in the Appalachian region. Funding will be used to support an undergraduate research conference in conjunction with other existing summer research activities at Marshall University, and participants in this program will attend and present their work. Each summer, a cohort of ten undergraduate students will be funded to work and live on the campus of Marshall University in Huntington, WV for eight weeks. During the first week, orientation activities will commence, including a discussion on research ethics, introductions to projects, and formalizing research groups. The slate of projects for the year will be introduced to students at this time with a variety of projects across mathematics and physics, including, but not limited to, computational projects on multi-messenger astrophysics and inverse scattering, laboratory research on filtration of textile dyes, and pure mathematical projects in complex analysis and special functions theory. During weeks two through seven, participants will be working full time on their research, regularly see presentations by speakers invited by the REU organizers, and regularly give presentations on their research to peers. In the final week, attendance at the new summer undergraduate research conference and final writeups of research will occur. The AMPS program webpage will be hosted at http://amps.marshall.edu/. This project is jointly funded by the Mathematical Sciences Research Experiences for Undergraduates Sites Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.