Carlos Castillo-Chavez, chair and associate professor of the Biometrics Unit and director of the CU-SACNAS Mathematical Sciences Summer Institute, works with Claudia Salzberg, left, a biology and computer science major at Brown University, in the computer lab in 160 Warren Hall. Salzberg is a summer institute participant. Adriana Rovers/University Photography
College students from around the country taking part in a summer institute in theoretical and mathematical biology at Cornell are surprised to learn that math has uses outside of academia.
"We don't do a lot of research at my school. It's nice to see some real-world applications," said Julio Villarreal, a senior math major from the University of San Diego. "I've never seen math done with biology before. It's nice to see you can do things with math besides teach."
Villarreal is one of 35 students spending six weeks this summer at Cornell for the Mathematical Sciences Summer Institute sponsored by Cornell, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Security Agency (NSA) with the support of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), an organization dedicated to increasing the number of Latinos/Chicanos and Native Americans in mathematics and the sciences. SACNAS helped recruit the students.
A three-year NSF grant provides one-third of the support, with additional support from the NSA, the Cornell provost, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and, for six international Latino students, partial support was provided by their own Mexican institutions, Mexico's NSF (CONACYT) and the University of Texas at El Paso.
The institute is directed by Carlos Castillo-Chavez, Cornell chair and associate professor of the Biometrics Unit, and Herbert Medina, visiting assistant professor of mathematics from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. It brings to Cornell 35 undergraduate students from eight states, Mexico and Puerto Rico and 24 academic institutions for six weeks of mathematical and theoretical biology.
"A lot of these students have never even seen a minority scientist," Castillo-Chavez said. "Many of them don't come from large research universities and don't have the support they need."
The summer program integrates math with biology "and also shows them the rigors of graduate school," Castillo-Chavez said. "There are no grades, no tests and no credit. This is not a course; it is a workshop and research experience."
Students listen to a lecture every morning, and twice a week they have a computer lab where they work on problems and do experiments and a writing seminar based on readings in evolutionary biology.
On a recent Monday afternoon, half the group was ensconced in a Warren Hall computer lab, many of them using Mathematica and Matlab software for the first time. With teaching assistants and lecturers leading the session, the students learned how to predict the number of new HIV cases in the United States using mathematical models.
"This integrates math and biology. We are teaching dynamical systems and modeling," Castillo-Chavez explained. "They are doing computer experiments, mathematical analyses of biological problems, statistics and probability." Also, the students must complete a research project by the end of the summer program by working in small groups -- another innovation that many of the students have not experienced.
"The aim is to provide them with an interdisciplinary experience which will better prepare them for graduate studies as well as to expose them to current mathematical sciences research," said Medina, who is serving as the summer director.
Students receive a $2,000 stipend for the six weeks, but they earn something more valuable:
"I'm really hoping to come away with a research experience," said Roberta Winston, a Native American (Navajo) student majoring in computer science at New Mexico State University. "This really helps me see how math can be applied in the real world. It's been all textbook until now. Now I see how statistical analysis is really important in understanding results." Plus, she is learning about opportunities in computer science, she said.