Three of our undergraduate students were awarded 2021 ASSURE Fellowhips: Valerie Fong (mentor Assistant Professor Owen Lewis), Franklyn Pezzuti (mentor Professor Monika Nitsche), and Matias Shedden (mentor Associate Professor Stephen Lau). Here is a brief description provided by the mentors of the research their mentees are planning on conducting:

• Valerie will be continuing the project she began as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar. Valerie's project applies variance based sensitivity analysis techniques to the Hodgkin-Huxley model of nerve cell action potentials in order to quantify the dependence of neuron spiking frequency on physiological and experimental parameters. 
• Franklin will study the properties of multiple nested drops in Stokes flow as a function of the flow parameters. He will also determine under which conditions the multi-drops break when flowing through a constriction.
• The SXS Gravitational Waveform Database (see https://data.black-holes.org/waveforms/catalog.html) collects results from numerical simulations of blackhole collisions. With collaborators at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Matias is working on the extraction of asymptotic signals from such simulations (roughly the gravitational waves which would reach Earth from a collision which occurs in a distant part of the universe). The research involves both approximation theory and Python software development.

Please join us in congratulating Valerie, Franklyn, and Matias as well as their mentors!

The Arts & Sciences Support for Undergraduate Research Experience (ASSURE) program, launched in Fall 2021,  is  designed to foster faculty-student research collaborations, and, as such, A&S is particularly eager to fund work through which students have the opportunity to engage in thoughtful and progressively sophisticated work central to the overall research program of the principal investigator.