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Learn as you go! How I went from Mathematics to Biology.

Monday May 8 at 4pm in Olin 201. An interdisciplinary approach only requires an open mind and a sprinkle of serendipity. This talk will be a brief overview of my journey through STEM and how I was able to approach biological problems by starting with faint recollections from my mathematics training. Each problem required me to learn new concepts in biology and relearn mathematics to solve a problem. In this talk I will discuss three vignettes on how I applied mathematics to solve a protein geometry problem, to simplify a complex network based on gene-to-gene relationships, and to determine the processes that underlie the decay of biological molecules. All three stories share a central theme: learn as you go and be open to ideas! Bio: Matthew Tien is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Whitman College. His research interests center on finding novel gene-regulatory systems in bacteria and engineering microbes for bioremediation efforts. Matthew was an undergraduate at the University of
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From Sports Analytics to Business Analytics

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Monday April 24 at 4pm in Olin 201. Riley Foreman '15 will talk about business analytics, as part of her role within Hippo . Riley partners with various business units to solve highly analytical and operational problems. She will be sharing one of her recent analyses that helped inform the day-to-day activities of Hippo's new Account Management team and efforts to retain customers within the Hippo Agency. Riley will also discuss how her liberal arts and mathematics background helps her navigate the highly-regulated and complex insurance industry and understand how other areas of the company, such as the actuarial team, affects overall strategy and operations.   Bio: Riley Foreman '15 is currently the manager of business operations and finance at Hippo Insurance. After completing a combined degree in Economics-Mathematics from Whitman College, she began her career in ESPN's Stats & Info Group as a Production Researcher, providing stats-driven storylines to b
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Business Intelligence: Gathering, Visualizing, and Analyzing Big Data

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Monday April 10 at 4pm in Olin 201. Brooke Taylor will discuss a career path in Business Intelligence, a technical role combining mathematics and computer science to deliver key insights to organizations on trends, drivers, and areas of opportunity through working with data. She will walk through the skills required in the role and how her experiences at Whitman and in internships played a role in her success, provide examples of business problems she has worked on at Amazon, and also outline similar roles and how they differ (e.g. Data Science, Business/Data Analyst, Data Engineer).   Bio: Brooke graduated from Whitman in 2018, majoring in Mathematics and minoring in Computer Science and Physics. She is currently a Senior Business Intelligence Engineer at Amazon, and over the past five years has worked on business problems in Alexa, Customer Service, and Supply Chain. While she began her Amazon journey out in Boston, she is now back in the Seattle area living with two cat
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Support Vector Machines, Convolutions, and Careers in Data Science

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Monday March 27 at 4pm in Olin 201. Speaker: Dr. Elly Farnell. Support vector machines are one of many techniques within the realm of classification problems in machine learning – given labeled training data that contains multiple classes (e.g. pictures of cats and dogs with associated labels), we define an algorithm to determine which class a novel data point belongs to (in the cats and dogs example, we’d like our algorithm to be able to tell us whether a new picture contains a cat or a dog). I’ll talk about theoretical results related to support vector machines that we recently published in Foundations of Data Science, which use a classical theorem from topology to characterize when a linear classifier is optimal. I’ll also talk about some of the work I do at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and will highlight how a particular type of function called a convolution has played a particularly useful role. Finally, as someone who has transitioned from academia to a data science c
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A Path to Applied Mathematics at the DOE

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Monday February 27 at 4pm in Olin 201. Dr. Rick Archibald will discuss pathways to careers in applied mathematics at the Department of Energy (DOE). This talk is part of the Computational Research Leadership Council (CRLC) Seminar Series 2022-2023. This presentation will highlight different applied mathematical research that is supported at the laboratory complex at the Department of Energy (DOE). It will focus on data analytics and provide information on various programs designed to foster engagement with the DOE.  BIO: Dr. Archibald received his Ph.D. in Mathematics, from Arizona State University in 2002. He works in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory .  Dr. Archibald 's research interests lie in data reconstruction and analysis, high-order edge detection, large scale optimization, time integration, and uncertainty quantification.  
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An Ultrasonic Brain-Computer Interface: Using Math and Sound to Listen to the Brain

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Monday February 13 at 4pm in Olin 201. Whitney Griggs, a Caltech MD-PhD candidate and Josephine de Karman Fellow, will discuss ways to apply the mathematical sciences in biomedical career paths, with a focus on computational and translational neuroscience. Using interactive case studies, he will discuss his own journey from learning mathematical reasoning at Whitman to applying these mathematical skills to the design of ultrasonic brain-computer interfaces. Whitney will highlight several key aspects of this project, including converting radiofrequency data into ultrasound images, implementing real-time neural decoders, and using Euclidean transformations to stabilize the neural decoder across multiple months.   BIO:   Whitney is currently a 6th year MD-PhD candidate in the UCLA-Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program. Since 2001, he has been interested in brain-computer interfaces, and, after 22 years of fortuitous events, he is now pursuing a PhD where he investigates ways to impr
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Location: 345 Boyer Ave, Walla Walla, WA 99362, USA
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Let's Get Tropical! (with Moduli Spaces of Curves)

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  Monday February 6 at 4pm in Olin 201. Our own Andy Fry will talk about tropical mathematics. Tropical mathematics replaces addition ( a+b ) with taking the minimum (min{ a,b }) and multiplication ( ab ) with addition ( a+b ). When we do this, lines and curves transform ( tropicalize ) into piecewise-linear objects. A strength of tropical geometry is that it allows us to look at a "linear" skeleton of a potentially complicated geometric object, reducing algebro-geometric questions to those of combinatorics. A strong trend in modern algebraic geometry is the study of  moduli (parameter) spaces . Broadly, a moduli space parameterizes geometric objects, and we can define algebraic moduli spaces and tropical moduli spaces independently. My research investigates tropicalization questions involving moduli spaces of curves, that is, which algebraic moduli spaces "tropicalize" to their tropical counterparts. In this talk, I will introduce tropical mathemati
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