Elizabeth Corderman (B.S. ’94) lives her childhood dream of a career at NASA.

When Elizabeth Corderman (B.S. ’94, mathematics and computer science; M.S. ’99, computer science) was 12 years old, her fascination with space launched a big dream. And she was serious about making it happen.  

“I’ve wanted to work at NASA all my life, and I always had enough sense to know that being an astronaut is a pie in the sky dream like being a movie star or a star athlete or something, obviously people get to do it but it’s very rare,” Corderman explained. “Then it dawned on me that for every astronaut in space, there’s all those people who do all the work on the ground supporting them and making sure they get home, and I was like, ‘I could do one of those jobs.’”

Fast forward 35 years and Corderman is living that dream and more. In her nearly 28-year career at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center she’s worked on everything from satellite missions and the Hubble Space Telescope program to her current job as deputy mission operations readiness manager for Landsat 9, an Earth-imaging satellite set to launch later this year.

“NASA is just a very rewarding place to work, it’s just, I love it,” she said.

“I was the nerd”

Corderman grew up in Hagerstown, Maryland. A little on the quiet side, she was a good student and a bit of a geek, doing especially well in math and science. 

I’m the oldest of three,” she said. “I was the nerd, a little shy nerd.”

Her father, John, a Hagerstown attorney who became a state senator and later a judge, encouraged her to work hard in school and keep working toward her NASA dream.

“I watched launches with my dad and that’s when I realized this could actually be a thing that I could do,” Corderman recalled. “It wasn’t so much that I was into math and science as it was that I wanted to work at NASA and what did I need to do to get there.”

In high school, she entered the annual school science fair and discovered that NASA was closer than she ever imagined—about 70 miles down the road in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“For the science fair you had to do a little project and I did something about space,” Corderman explained. “And representatives from NASA came and gave awards to everybody who did space-related stuff, and the prize was a tour of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. I don’t even remember much about the tour, but it did make me realize NASA is here in Maryland, not just in Texas or Florida. And that was a big deal.”

When it was time to go to college, Corderman stayed close to home, enrolling at the University of Maryland. Looking back, she realizes it was inevitable.

“Both my parents went to Maryland, they met at Maryland, both my younger brothers went to Maryland,” Corderman said. “We are a Maryland family.”

Corderman entered Maryland as a math major and a Francis Scott Key Scholar. One of the people on the interview committee for that scholarship was John Gannon, a computer science professor who would become her mentor.

“He was teaching a section of one of the giant lecture hall intro classes and he was really formative,” Corderman explained. “I grew up in the ’80s. People were doing stuff with computers but I didn’t have a lot of experience. I felt intimidated by all these guys who’d been coding in their basements. And he was like, ‘You’re smarter than all of them. You just don’t have the experience. So, just stick it out and when you have the experience, you’re going to run circles around them.’”

The more Corderman worked with computers, the more she enjoyed it. So, as a sophomore, she took the plunge, taking on a second major in computer science. A year later, armed with a growing knowledge of software and programming—and memories of that science fair tour in high school—she applied and was accepted for a co-op work-study assignment at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which continued through her graduation in December 1994. From there, Corderman kept working at Goddard until she went back to Maryland to get her master’s degree in computer science, again, with her college mentor supporting her every step of the way.

Two words that changed everything

When Corderman got her graduate degree, she was still working at NASA, writing software for the Earth Observing System, an ongoing series of satellite missions for global observation of the Earth’s surface.

“The first three missions I worked were Terra, Aqua and Aura,” Corderman said. “The satellites, they’re all still up there, which is kind of crazy.”

Corderman was working on the Terra mission when one of the pieces of software she wrote was declared “launch critical”—two words that changed everything.

“What it meant was I got to sit in the control room. My job was to sit behind the guy who was using my software, in case there was a problem,” Corderman explained. “At NASA we like to practice a lot, so there were all these mission simulations going on where they kind of pretend it was launching. They’d have a big piece of hardware that simulates the spacecraft and feeds telemetry to the ground, and they’d put these anomalies in to test people and all the loops were going and people were saying go and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. This is why I wanted to come to NASA.”

Mechanic for the mission

For the Aqua and Aura missions, Corderman took on a management role and then kept moving up from there. By 2009, she was working on the Hubble program as senior ground system engineer, a “mechanic” for the mission.

“I’m a mechanic, someone who takes care of the bus, no matter what the payload is. Some buses have people in them, some buses have equipment on them,” she explained. “My job kind of stays the same whether it’s a communications satellite or a science satellite or even a manned vehicle.”

Deployed by space shuttle Discovery in 1990, Hubble was the first major optical telescope to be placed in space and has made more than 1.4 million observations over the course of its lifetime. Working on Hubble gave Corderman a ringside seat for a chapter in space history.

“The heritage of it was just amazing,” Corderman observed. “There’s all these interesting little details because it’s so old. Most satellites have what we call a solid-state recorder on them. It’s basically a giant flash drive to hold the data when it’s recorded before it’s communicated to the ground. Hubble had a tape drive when it first launched, it was magnetic tape and a reel to reel and at the time I was like, ‘No way!’”

Corderman stayed with Hubble until late 2013 when she moved on to the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), a NASA/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that uses U.S. polar-orbiting satellites to provide data for weather forecasting and climate monitoring. As the command, control and communications (C3S) lead, Corderman made sure antennas, data systems, hardware and software at the control center were ready for the 2017 launch of J1, the first of four planned JPSS satellites.

Planning for missions, launching satellites—it’s the stuff Corderman used to dream about. She still gets geeked just thinking about it.

“It’s just so amazing when we’re launching,” Corderman explained. “The whole business with telemetry where I can look at a screen and realize that’s happening up there and I can see it down here, I just think that’s really cool. It just amazes me that we can do that.”

“Geeking out big time”

Corderman now works as deputy mission operations readiness manager for Landsat 9, a NASA partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey. Her job is to run the ground system and help prepare the operations team for the September 2021 launch of the ninth satellite in the Landsat series, which aims to monitor, understand and manage the land resources needed to sustain human life.  Not long after she joined Landsat in 2019, Corderman had one of her coolest space experiences ever—a satellite communications test.

“I spent three weeks out at the spacecraft vendor doing this test with the satellite and I got to go to the clean room,” Corderman recalled. “I’d never been in a clean room before in my life and I was just geeking out big time. I was scared to cough; I had like 14 things all covering me and my hair was dyed purple at the time and I was sure they were going to find purple hair in the clean room and I was going to get in trouble. I was really just fascinated by the whole thing, you know, how you build a satellite.”

What’s next for Corderman after Landsat 9 launches this fall? She isn’t sure, but she knows whatever it is, she’ll be at NASA. After nearly three decades, the work is still everything her 12- year-old self hoped it would be.

“It’s just, I love it,” Corderman explained. “We’re so mission focused. Most of the people I work with are so committed to the mission, what’s the best thing for the mission. That’s just really rewarding.”

And it’s not just the work. Corderman appreciates that the job she loves also keeps her close to the people who are most important in her life—Terp classmates who have become lifelong friends and, most of all, her family.

“I’m really close to my family,” she explained. “My dad passed away in 2012, and my mom and I were always close. We’re extra close now. And my two brothers—one’s in Hagerstown and one’s in Fairfax. Between the two of them they’ve got four kids and I don’t have any kids of my own, so I love being an aunt, it’s just the best thing. I’m really blessed.”

Corderman is living the life she grew up dreaming about and worked hard to achieve—pursuing a challenging career at NASA that let her reach for the stars yet stay close to home. For her, it’s the best of all worlds.

“I’m very lucky and luck is the word,” Corderman said. “I lived in Maryland, the University of Maryland was right down the road, Goddard was right down the road, it just all really worked out perfectly. I couldn’t ask for more.”

Written by Leslie Miller

We welcomed 13 new members to the Math Family this fall!

Gail Letzer. Gail is a researcher at the NSA and a former math professor at Virginia Tech. She will bespending next year as a visiting fellow with the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science. Her interests are in quantum groups, Lie representation theory, applied algebraic geometry, and cryptography. Gail is a member of the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She currently serves as a major technical advisor to the chief and deputies of NSA’s Mathematical Research Group.

Cleve Moler. Cleve is the founder and chief mathematician of MathWorks. He was the driving force in the development of MATLAB. He is a highly distinguished scientist, with honors including election in the National Academy of Engineering, the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession, and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal. Cleve recently moved to St. Michaels, Maryland, and was looking for a home base for his academic endeavors, which we are happy to offer.

Radhakrishnan Balu. Rad is a program manager in the Mathematical Sciences Division of the Army Research Office. His research focuses on quantum information processing. As a representative of the Department of Defense community, his collaborations span research groups at major universities including the Joint Quantum Institute as well as industrial partners such as Zapata and IBM. Rad is located in Adelphi, Maryland.

Jean Opsomer. Jean was the chair of the Department of Statistics at Colorado State University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.He currently serves as the vice president of Rockville, Maryland-based Westat, where he is responsible for the statistical and survey methodology of large-scale survey projects.

 Antonio De Rosa. Antonio received his B.S. from the University of Rome in 2012 and his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 2017 under the supervision of De Lellis and De Philippis. He is currently a Courant Instructor at NYU. Antonio’s expertise is in geometric measure theory, calculus of variations and minimal surfaces. Some of his most significant results are in the area of geometric variational problems driven by anisotropic surface tensions.

Yihang Zhu. Yiahang received his B.S. from Tsinghua in 2012 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2017 under the supervision of Kisin. He is currently a Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia. Yihang is a number theorist, whose research focuses on Shimura varieties and trace formulas.  He has obtained a wide array of major results at the interface of number theory, arithmetic geometry and representation theory. 

Todd Rowland. Todd earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He worked for 15 years at Wolfram Research and then as a research scientist at Quantum Gravity Research.

Eoin Mackall. Eoin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta and works in algebraic geometry and algebraic K-theory.

 New Office Staff
Jolanta Agi Alipio
To Anh Chung
Yodit Giackero
Sara Moran
Sydney Han

Lozier honored for contributions to online NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions 

University of Maryland alumnus Daniel Lozier (Ph.D. ’79, applied mathematics) was honored by having his portrait added to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Gallery of Distinguished Scientists, Engineers and Administrators on October 23, 2020. Lozier’s addition brought the number of portraits to just 351.

NIST Director Walt Copan called this recognition the highest honor that NIST bestows on its employees and referred to the portrait gallery as NIST’s hall of fame.

Lozier was honored for “outstanding technical contributions and exceptional leadership to provide an online, interactive, and authoritative reference for special functions of applied mathematics, the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF).”

“Of course I was surprised to receive this honor but happily received it on behalf of the many dedicated individuals who worked with me to make the DLMF happen,” Lozier said.

The DLMF appeared in May 2010, bringing the 1964 Handbook of Mathematical Functions, the agency's most widely cited publication of all time, fully up to date with 21st century requirements. The free online library provides researchers in all areas of science essential information needed to utilize the special functions of applied mathematics, which are ubiquitous in mathematical modeling and simulation.

No off-the-shelf commercial products were available for effectively presenting highly technical mathematics on the web. Creating the DLMF website required Lozier and others at NIST to develop new tools for mathematical authoring, for display of colorful three-dimensional function visualizations, and for searching in mathematics-intense databases, all created specifically for web-based content.

“Part of the technical hurdle was translating all the complicated math formulas into a format that could be used by the web,” Lozier said at the time—when the tools for displaying math on the web were still in their infancy.

Government Computer News magazine honored the DLMF with one of its 10 annual awards for information technology achievement in government in 2011. Lozier was also awarded the U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2011 for this work.

“It took a decade of effort,” Lozier said at the time, “but the painstakingly verified 10,000 equations, 600 visualizations and 2,500 references in the DLMF should provide scientists and engineers with ready access to information they need to do advanced mathematical modeling and computational simulation well into the 21st century.”

Co-authors of DLMF included the late Frank Olver, who worked at NIST until 1986 when he joined UMD as a professor of mathematics with a joint appointment in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST), and Charles Clark, a NIST division chief, Joint Quantum Institute Fellow and IPST adjunct professor.

“The DLMF did not end in 2010,” Lozier said. “The NIST team is continually adding mathematical content and making IT improvements, disseminated in a regular series of quarterly updates.”

Lozier worked as a mathematician from 1969 to 2019 in what is now called NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory. His research interests centered on numerical analysis, special functions, computer arithmetic, and mathematical software construction and testing.

During his career, Lozier published more than 40 papers and served as an associate editor of Mathematics of Computation, the Journal of Research of NIST, and the Journal of Numerical Analysis, Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

He has maintained a close relationship with his alma mater, serving as an adjunct professor in applied mathematics at UMD from 1986 to 1997. He also created the Daniel W. Lozier Graduate Student Travel Endowment in 2018 to support applied mathematics graduate students at UMD traveling to national or international conferences to give oral or poster presentations.

“My experience at UMD enabled my career, so I wanted to do something that would help graduate students develop their own careers in mathematics,” Lozier said. “This led to my decision to establish the Graduate Student Travel Endowment.”

This article includes information and content provided by NIST.

The Merrill Presidential Scholars Program honors the university’s most successful seniors

Two seniors in the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics have been named 2020 Merrill Presidential Scholars. The Merrill Presidential Scholars Program honors the university’s most successful seniors, and each of the honorees recognizes a UMD faculty member and high school teacher who helped guide them throughout their academic careers.

“One nice thing about the Merrill Scholars Program is the aspect of it that honors mentors, because I really think that I would not have achieved a single thing that I've done without the support and kindness I've experienced throughout my life,” said Siri Neerchal, one of the 2020 recipients. 

Neerchal started out as a math major at Maryland and later decided to add a second degree.

“I really enjoy math and I knew going into college that I wanted to do something data driven,” Neerchal said. “As a sophomore, I added a second degree in history.”

One faculty member in particular was very helpful in shaping Neerchal’s academic course.

“I approached Associate Professor Colleen Woods from the Department of History for guidance in an independent study on postcolonial theory,” Neerchal said. “And since then, she has been a source of conversation, ideas and support. My discussions with her have shaped my ideas and have helped me rework existing systems and concepts into a refined critical framework that informs my approach to quantitative research.”

While at Maryland, Neerchal found creative ways to blend math with other subjects. For three semesters, Neerchal taught the course MATH299C: Mathematics & Classical Music, which explored the historical discoveries in mathematics that have influenced Western classical music, as a part of the university’s Student Initiated Courses (STICs) program. From there, Neerchal went on to help other students develop their own STICs and now serves as executive director of the STICs program. 

“I got involved with the STICs board and enjoyed helping people develop their courses,” Neerchal said. “Now as the executive director I still get to do that and work with the administration to expand the program and ensure its long-term sustainability.” 

After graduating in May, Neerchal will work as a research fellow at Stanford University’s Law School doing empirical social science research.

“The research is very quantitative work, but in a social science context, which is what I'm interested in,” Neerchal said. “It is a great opportunity to put both of my degrees to work.”

Mary Yilma, the department’s second Merrill Scholar, is also a double-degree student, pursuing degrees in mathematics and economics.

Yilma began her studies as an economics major and added mathematics this semester after she realized she had taken enough courses to qualify for the major.

“I just added the additional degree in my final year, and I think it provides a nice quantitative backing to the theory I learned in my economics classes,” she said.

Yilma almost missed her opportunity to be a Merrill Scholar because of an email issue.

“Finding out that I was being considered was pretty flattering. I didn't expect it,” she said. “I missed the email for two weeks because it kept getting caught in my junk mail. Finally, someone else emailed me and asked me if I still wanted to be considered, and that email came through.”

Yilma recognized Jessica Goldberg, an associate professor in the Department of Economics, as her faculty mentor.

“Dr. Goldberg directs PADE (Promoting Achievement and Diversity in Economics), a program that provides academic support to students with the aim of increasing diversity and achievement among economics majors,” Yilma explained. “She gave me tireless feedback on my academic choices, introduced me to some great graduate student mentors, and helped me learn about different careers in economics and what their day to day entails. Dr. Goldberg is always in my corner and willing to suggest options I didn’t even know existed. Her office is always open, and she goes above and beyond for her students. I cannot thank her enough for her guidance.”

Yilma will be working as a research associate at Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco after she graduates in May. She believes the PADE program is a great tool for students in economics looking for career opportunities.

“It's a really good option for people who are interested in pursuing a career in economics. It provides really good resources and mentorship,” she said.

In a typical year, Merrill Scholars would be honored at a reception along with their mentors, but the event was not held this year due to COVID-19. However, Yilma and Neerchal were both glad to still have the opportunity to highlight their mentors through being recipients of the award.

“I'm very glad to be able to thank my high school teacher, Mr. Moose, and my mentor, Associate Professor Goldberg, because they're both really great educators and really great people,” Yilma said. 

“It was so nice to receive this award and have the opportunity to name people who I considered mentors both before and during college,” Neerchal said. “I would not be where I am today without the mentors I’ve had in my life.”

She will use the scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in speech and language processing at the University of Edinburgh.

University of Maryland senior Nataliya Stepanova has been named one of the 46 Marshall Scholars for 2021. The Marshall Scholarship, which allows American students to pursue graduate study at any university in the United Kingdom, is considered one of the most prestigious academic awards available to college graduates.

“The Marshall Scholarship is not only immensely prestigious, but extraordinarily selective. To be amongst this new class of Britain-bound all-stars is testament to Nataliya’s brilliance, vision, and determination to change the world,” said Richard Bell, a UMD professor of history who serves as UMD’s advisor for U.K. scholarships and fellowships. He also chairs the university’s U.K. awards nomination committee.

Stepanova, a double-degree student in mathematics and computer science with a minor in linguistics, plans to use the scholarship toward a Master of Science degree in speech and language processing at the University of Edinburgh. 

“I am extremely grateful for this amazing opportunity,” said Stepanova, who was born in Russia and moved to the United States when she was 2 years old. “Receiving the Marshall scholarship would not have been possible without the endless guidance I have received from UMD programs, passionate professors and supportive research mentors. I look forward to spending my time in the United Kingdom learning from natural language processing experts and collaborating with a global network of language scientists.” 

UMD’s sixth Marshall Scholar, Stepanova has extensive natural language processing research experience, including several projects related to her career goal of deploying natural language processing techniques to combat the plague of fake news and misinformation circulating on social media.

As a research assistant in the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS), a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) sponsored by the Department of Defense, she worked on a project investigating the impact of transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation on foreign language learning.

“Nataliya is a gifted student and has become the bar against which all other undergraduate researchers I hire are judged,” said Polly O’Rourke, who was Stepanova’s supervisor and is an associate research scientist at ARLIS. “She excelled at every task we gave her, even when the tasks were difficult or outside her experience.”

In another ongoing ARLIS project in collaboration with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), she is using natural language processing techniques and machine learning to investigate to what extent one can predict the number of shares Eastern European social and political influencers’ Facebook posts would get, based on the topics discussed in the posts.

“By investigating social media campaigns in Eastern Europe, mainly Poland, I quickly learned that deep linguistic and cultural knowledge of the target community is vital for nuanced natural language processing analyses,” Stepanova said. 

She learned a similar lesson through a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship, where she spent a summer in South Korea. 

“Interacting with native Koreans allowed me to pick up on slang, emoticons and internet lingo that I could not have learned from a textbook,” she said. “Such informal language constitutes a critical component of social media analyses.”

Back on campus, she is a Banneker/Key Scholar, earned a citation from the University Honors program and participated in the PULSAR interdisciplinary language science program. Stepanova served as a Department of Mathematics Strauss Teaching Assistant for calculus I and II, participated in and served as a teaching fellow for the Global Fellows in Washington, D.C. program, and taught math in Russian to bilingual elementary school students. She also volunteered with the high school Maryland Science Olympiad and the Chesapeake Education, Arts and Research Society.

Stepanova’s long-term plans involve gaining expertise in natural language processing research—either through a Ph.D. program or an industry position—and acquiring legal and policy knowledge that will ensure her research findings are used to inform smart and effective policy.

“I also hope to contribute to the development of policies regulating social media content that endangers public health,” she said. “My time spent at Edinburgh will ensure that my research on misinformation is rooted in an understanding of the global trends in English-language social media propagation and can thus be used to advise social media regulation policies developed both in the U.S. and the U.K.”

Founded by a 1953 Act of Parliament and named in honor of U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the Marshall Scholarships commemorate the humane ideals of the Marshall Plan and they express the continuing gratitude of the British people to their American counterparts. The first class of 12 Marshall Scholars arrived in the United Kingdom in 1954; those elected today will enter universities in 2021. 

The scholarships, which can be extended up to three years, provide university fees, cost of living expenses, an annual book grant, a thesis grant, research and daily travel grants, fares to and from the United States, and a contribution toward the support of a dependent spouse.

We proudly recognize members of our community who recently garnered major honors, awards and promotions.

Faculty

Dmitry Dolgopyat was elected as a foreign member of the Academia Europaea.

Roohollah Ebrahimian received the Provost’s Excellence Award for Professional Track Faculty.

Vadim Kaloshin will receive a gold medal from the International Consortium of Chinese Mathematics (ICCM) for his joint paper with Guam Huang and Alfonso Sorrentino.

Gail Letzter was named a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Sergei Novikov was awarded the 2020 Russian Academy of Sciences Gold Medal.

Konstantina Trivisa was named director of UMD’s Institute for Physical Science and Technology.

Graduate Students

Alexander Prize: Patrick Daniels and Ke Xue

Undergraduate Students

Marshall Scholar: Nataliya Stepanova

Merrill Scholars: Siri Neerchal and Mary Yilma

Alumni

Sharon Crook (M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ’96, Applied Mathematics) received the 2020 Charles Wexler Teaching Award, the highest honor a faculty member can receive from the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Arizona State University.

Susan Ferensic (B.S. '91, Mathematics) was named Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Columbia, South Carolina Field Office.

Robert Hollingshead (B.S. ’92, mathematics; B.S. ’92 electrical engineering) was named a shareholder and chair of Greenberg Traurig, LLP’s Japan Intellectual Property Practice.

Tamara Kolda (M.A. '95, Applied Mathematics), scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, was one of 87 members elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

David Marker (B.S. ’78, Mathematics), senior statistician and associate director at Westat, was named co-chair of the American Statistical Association’s Anti-Racism Task Force.

Richard Palczynski (M.A. '71, Mathematics), founder and president of SeaTower Insurance Consulting Services, LLC was named to the Care Bridge International 2020 Advisory Board.

LaRee Tracy (M.A. '02, Statistics) was named director of biostatistics at PHASTAR.