Mathematics Students, Faculty Share Research
Published: August 25, 2025.
Students awarded the Outstanding Poster Award at National Mathematics Conference
Four ÃÛÑ¿ÊÓƵ students presented at the national mathematics conference, MAA-Mathfest in August. Both posters were awarded the MAA Outstanding Student Poster Award, which is given to the top posters in research areas.
"Mathematically Modeling Disease Transmission Between Hospitals and Long-Term Care Facilities," was presented by computer science major and mathematics minor, Zack Littell at the MAA Student Poster session. Mathematics professor Dr. Brittany Stephenson mentored Littell through ÃÛÑ¿ÊÓƵ' SURE program.
A three-student team of Tony Kochev (Data Science Major and Mathematics Minor), Luke Pekol (Mathematics and Finance Major), and Zach Pekol (Mathematics Secondary Education Major), presented the poster, "Analysis of Home Team Advantage for National Collegiate Men’s Volleyball." This project was mentored by mathematics faculty Dr. Amanda Harsy and Dr. Adam Schultze through ÃÛÑ¿ÊÓƵ' Noyce and SURE programs.
Kochev, Pekol, and Pekol also presented a talk at the Mathematics and Sports session.
Mathematics faculty present and organize sessions at MathFest
Mathematics faculty Drs. Amanda Harsy, Marie Meyer, Adam Schultze, and Brittany Stephenson presented and organized various sessions at the MAA Mathfest.
Harsy, Meyer, Schultze, and Stephenson presented "Win, Lose, or Draw: The Impact of Games on Mathematical Thinking" at the SoTL: Focus on Game-based Learning Session.
Stephenson presented "Mathematical Models of Disease Transmission in Long-Term Care Facilities" at the MAA Invited Paper Session "Trends in Mathematical and Computational Biology."
Also, Harsy was a panelist for the "Initiating Your Undergraduate Research and Mentoring: Strategies and Insights Across SIGMAAs," which was organized by Dr. Adam Schultze as part of his role as the Program Coordinator for the MAA SIGMAA on Undergraduate Research. Amanda Harsy also organized two paper sessions, the "Mathematics and Sports" Paper Session and the "10 Golden Years: Stories of Struggle and Success from the Gold'14 Project NExT Cohort" Invited Paper session. Through her role as the Chair of the MAA Subcommittee on Assessment of Student Learning, she also co-organized the Panel, "Leveraging Assessment and Placement Practices to Promote Equity."
Finally, Meyer co-led a minicourse, "Teaching Mathematics Through Games."
Adam Schultze and Amanda Harsy Publish Paper
Drs. Amanda Harsy and Adam Schultze co-authored a paper with student researchers, Mia Adler (Pomona College), Ford McDill (Wesleyan University), Tiffanie Ng (Kenyon College), Will Paz (Miami University), Iris Horng (University of Pennsylvania), and Samuel Thomas (Brown University).
Their paper, "," which provides alternative methods of comparing bareback riders by extending classical linear algebraic ranking methods (specifically, the Colley, Massey, Keener, and PageRank methods) to rank bareback riders based on their PRCA performance data. This research assesses the effectiveness and predictive power of these standard methods.
This paper came through their work as faculty mentors of the 2024 Summer@ICERM program at Brown University through the
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