1. Speaker: Meilin Zheng, 3pm - 3:30pm. Title: COVID-19 in the United States: Exploring Trends and Disparities in Infection Severity and Mortality. Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in millions of deaths in the United States, highlighting and exacerbating various disparities across racial, gender, and regional lines. To address these inadequacies in our healthcare system and inform future practices, it is crucial to analyze existing data. An examination of first-year COVID-19 data has revealed significant disparities in infection severity and mortality rates based on race, ethnicity, gender, and region. For example, Native Americans were found to have over four times the risk of progressing to severe COVID-19 symptoms when compared to White individuals.
Furthermore, different zip code regions exhibited significant differences in performance. In zip code area 5, all races had a higher infection risk than White individuals, while in zip code area 1, Black individuals fared better than White individuals, but Asians had the worst outcomes. To address these disparities, healthcare policies must be tailored to the specific needs of each local situation. By enhancing healthcare policies, we can work towards improving outcomes and reducing disparities across all populations.

2. Speaker: Kioshi Morosin, 3:30pm - 4pm. Title:  An Algebraist’s Introduction to Multiresolution Analysis. Abstract: Multiresolution analysis is in many ways a successor to Fourier analysis and continues to see many novel and fascinating applications. While the development of abstract Fourier analysis made those techniques accessible to algebraists, the abstract formulations of multiresolution analyses and wavelets have been more obscure. We will detail approaches to constructing wavelets in L2(G) for locally-compact abelian groups G, both with and without a discrete subgroup to serve as a lattice, as well as provide a constructive, module theoretic description for multiresolution analyses in greater generality.