Math graduate student Austin Bell has been selected for this year’s 2021-22 Lobo Leadership & Involvement Awards!

Austin joined the Mathematics Graduate Program at UNM in Fall 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
He created the Math Directed Reading Program which officially started activities in Spring 2021. He and three other graduate and undergraduate students are leading this effort (this is completely student-organized and -lead, the department enthusiastically supports their endeavors).

In a nutshell the program pairs interested undergraduate students with graduate and advanced undergraduate students for study projects. Undergrads and math grad students will work through a math book or paper together over the course of a semester, culminating in presentations from the undergraduate on a fun thing they learned (we had presentations in Spring 2021 and Fall 2021, look forward presentations in Spring 2022). In select cases, undergrads maybe able to conduct research with the grads.Their  goal is to enable motivated undergraduates to engage with math in more depth and breadth than a classroom setting typically allows, and to foster a tight-knit mathematically community at UNM.

This semester they are also reaching out to promising high school students across the state to provide an online  Directed Reading Experience (9 or 10 high school students signed up for this online reading math program), they used the UNM-PNM Math Contest infrastructure to reach out to teachers who then shared this opportunity with students.

We are very proud and grateful of Austin's leadership getting off the ground and nurturing this program! Congratulations Austin!!