Four accomplished undergraduate students defended their Honors Theses¹ on April 15 and April 22, 2026: Aldo Morelli, Ernesto Morales Carrasco, Chayton Castruita, and Norman Boyd.

• Aldo talked about his work "On Bond, Invasion, and First Passage Percolation". His mentor was Assistant Professor Sarah Percival. Aldo is pursuing a PhD in Mathematics and  will attend University of Washington in Seattle, WA.
• Ernesto  talked about "Stopping Measles in Its Tracks: An Age-Structured SEIR-MV Model of Declining Vaccination, Waning Immunity, and Catch-Up Strategies". His mentor was Professor Helen Wearing. Ernesto is planning on pursuing his dual passion for the medical sciences and mathematics.
• Chayton talked about  "Cycle Types of Minimal Generating Sets of Differential Powers in Affine Semigroup Rings". His mentor was Professor Janet Vassilev. Chayton is pursuing a PhD in Mathematics and will attend University or Arkansas   in Fayetteville, AR.
• Norman  talked about "Randomized Least Squares Approaches for Training Random Fourier Neural Networks". His mentor was Professor Mohammad Motamed. Norman is pursuing a PhD in Applied Mathematics and will attend Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN.

The four of them did an excellent job in their public zoom presentations. In the intermediate weekend (April 18-19, 2026), they all presented their work  at the Southwest Undergraduate Mathematics Research Conference (SUnMaRC) at Northern Arizona University.

The Undergraduate Committee Chaired by Professor Anna Skripka, with members Assistant Professors Daniel Gomez and Miheer Dewaskar, organized the defense and evaluated the Honors Theses.

Congratulations Aldo, Ernesto, Chayton and Norman, and good luck in your future endeavors! 

¹Previous Honors Theses are listed  in this webpage.