Academic Year Research Opportunities

Many MSCS students collaborate in research during college. During the school year, research can be performed via an honors project, capstone project, or independent study. To initiate work with a Macalester faculty member, start by talking with a professor with whom you would like to work. Also visit the Macalester Science and Research Office.

Summer Research Opportunities

There are many opportunities for paid summer research, both at Macalester and off campus. Many colleges (including Macalester) have REUs (Research Experiences for Undergraduates), supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Keck Foundation, and/or the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. See theNSF listing of Math REUs, the AMS Listing of Math REUs and theNSF listing of CS REUs for active REU programs.

Macalester provides opportunities for paid summer research with a faculty sponsor. Usually, students live on (or near) campus. (MAXIMA is an exception: it is hosted at the nearby Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.) After completing their summer research, students can attend national meetings of professional societies to present their work. Sometimes, summer work even leads to a joint publication in a research journal.

Macalester Summer Research Opportunities

The Science Research Office maintains a list of on-campus MSCS research opportunities. These typically hire one or more Macalester students for summer research. For more information see the SRO webpage.  

External Summer Opportunities for Women

There are a few programs open exclusively to women:

• George Washington University hosts the Summer Program for Women in Mathematics.
• Carleton College hosts the Summer Mathematics Program for Women Undergraduates.
• About to go to graduate school? Consider the EDGE program for women during the summer before you start.

Some Other External Summer Opportunities

Other sites to look at for summer opportunities are listed below [some of these are open to students who have just graduated, some of these are open to non-US citizens:

• The Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI) has an Undergraduate Summer School which interacts with the Graduate Summer School and Research in Mathematics programs.
• NIST SURF is the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship with projects in applied mathematics.
• IPAM is the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. It hosts the Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) for undergraduates and recent graduates.
• The National Security Agency has a variety of summer programs.
• The DIMACS family of REUs is open to non US-citizens.
• National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis runs a program linking math and biology and is open to non US-citizens ( 2012 link)

A partial list of peer-reviewed collaborative papers by Macalester students

• Shoop, E., R. Brown, E. Biggers, M. Kane, D. Lin, and M. Warner (2012). Virtual clusters for parallel and distributed education. In: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education.
  SIGCSE ’12. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp.517522.
• Beveridge, Andrew and Cooke, Sean (’09) “The Mathematical Sorting Hat,” UMAP Journal, Vol. 33, No.2 (2012), 99—118.
• A. Catllá, A. McNamara (’10), and C.M. Topaz. Instabilities and patterns in coupled reaction-diffusion layers, Phys. Rev. E 85 (2) (2012) 026215.
• Addona, Vittorio and Roth, Jeremy (‘10) "Quantifying the Effect of Performance-Enhancing Drug Use on Fastball Velocity in Major League Baseball," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports: Vol. 6 : Iss. 2, Article 6.
• Daniel Flath, Tom Halverson, and Kathryn Herbig ('06), "The Planar Rook Algebra and Pascal's Triangle," L'Enseignement Mathématique, (2) 55 (2009), 77–92. Find in Digital Commons
• Lewin, D. ('09) and Addona, V. (2007) "Measuring player contribution in the NBA". 2007 Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Section on Statistics in Sports, Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association, pp. 2578–2580.
• Susan Fox and Peter Anderson-Sprecher (’06), "Robot Navigation Using Integrated Retrieval of Behaviors and Routes", Proceedings of the 19th International FLAIRS Conference (Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society), AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA. Presented at Melbourne Beach, Florida, May 2006. Find in Digital Commons
• William Briggs, Stephen Becker, Adrianne Pontarelli ('04), and Stan Wagon, The dynamics of falling dominoes, UMAP Journal, 26:1 (Spring 2005) 35–47
• Dale Beihoffer, Jemimah Hendry '03, Albert Nijenhuis, and Professor Stan Wagon, "Faster algorithms for Frobenius numbers," Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 12:1 (2005) R27
• Tom Halverson and Tim Lewandowski ('03), "RSK Insertion for Set Partitions and Diagram Algebras," Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Volume 11(2), (2004–2005) R24.
• Shoop E, Casaes P ('04), Onsongo G ('04), Lesnett L ('03), Petursdottir EO ('04), Donkor EK ('04), Tkach D ('03), Cosimini M ('05), "Data exploration tools for the Gene Ontology database," Bioinformatics. 2004 Dec 12;20(18):3442–54
• Momar Dieng ('00), Tom Halverson, and Vahe Poladian ('99), Characters of the q-rook monoid, J. Algebraic Combin., 17 (2003), no. 2, 99–123. Find in Digital Commons
• Tom Halverson and John Farina ('01), "Character orthogonality for the partition algebra and fixed points of permutations," Adv. in Appl. Math., 31 (2003), no. 1, 113–131.
• Michael Schneider and Tamas Nemeth ('99), "A Simulation Study of the OSPF/OMP Routing Algorithm," Computer Networks, 4 (2002).
• Andy Cantrell ('02), Tom Halverson, Brian Miller('02), "RSK Insertion for Cyclotomic Hecke Algebras," Journal of Combinatorial Theory A, 99 (2002).
• Chris Bremer ('02) and Danny Kaplan, "Markov Chain Monte Carlo Estimation of Nonlinear Dynamics from Time Series," Physica D, 160 (2001). Find in Digital Commons
• John Renze, ('01) Stan Wagon, B. Wick, "The Gaussian Zoo," Experimental Mathematics, 10, pp 161–173 (2001).
• John Bruning, Andy Cantrell ('02), Robert Longhurst, Dan Schwalbe, Stan Wagon, "Rhapsody in White: A victory for mathematics," The Mathematical Intelligencer, 22:3 (2000) 37–40. Find in Digital Commons
• Claire and Helaman Ferguson, Dan Schwalbe, Tamas Nemeth ('99), and Stan Wagon Invisible Handshake, The Mathematical Intelligencer, 21:4 (Fall 1999) 30–35. Find in Digital Commons
• Aaron Schlafly ('93) and Stan Wagon, Carmichael's conjecture is valid below 10^10,000,000, Mathematics of Computation 63 (1994) 415–419. Find in Digital Commons