$2.7M in new grants will support experiential learning.

Thousands of University of Maryland students will have new and enhanced learning experiences this year, thanks to a program designed to spur creativity in classroom instruction.

Nearly 300 courses across 86 academic programs have received support for the 2022-23 academic year from the new $2.7 million Teaching and Learning Innovation Grant initiative, an outgrowth of the university’s strategic plan. It calls for reimagining learning, and the initiative will encourage that in “inclusive, experiential, publicly engaged, creative, integrative, holistic and empowering” ways, according to Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice.

The grants are designed to “increase opportunities for students to do experiential learning—internships, field trips, a more high-engaged classroom environment,” said Marcio A. Oliveira, assistant vice president for academic innovation and technology and executive director of UMD’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center.

Four of the grants were awarded for mathematics and statistics courses: 

• Lecturers Jonathan Francis Fernandes and Mestiyage Gunatilleka received a grant for “Bringing Computing, Simulations, and Data Analysis to STAT 400”
• Professor Yanir Rubinstein received a grant for “Experiential Learning: Mathematics of Geometry and Data” (MATH 386)
• Senior Lecturer Hatice Sahinoglu received a grant for “A friendly introduction to Data Science with R”
• Assistant Professor Rodrigo Trevino received a grant for “Experimental Mathematics”

Designed specifically for working professionals, courses are taught by faculty experts in the evenings. 

https://scienceacademy.umd.edu/ 

New center hosted three workshops in the fall that brought mathematicians from all over the world to campus and has five more workshops planned for the spring.

The Brin Mathematics Research Center–launched just one year ago–has already hosted three successful workshops that brought mathematicians from all over the world to the University of Maryland’s College Park campus.

The first Brin MRC workshop, held in September, on “Low-Dimensional Topology and Homeomorphism Groups” was organized by Lei Chen, Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner and Boyu Zhang. Our probabilists, Sandra Cerria, Dima Dolgopyat, Yu Gu, and Leonid Koralov, organized a workshop on “Modern Topics in Probability.” This was an opportunity to celebrate Mark Freidlin and his many fundamental contributions to the study of various aspects of the theory of random perturbations of dynamical systems. A follow-up meeting on “Stochastic Partial Differential Equations and Related Topics” was organized by Sandra Cerrai, Yu Gu and Shalin Parekh. This conference brought to Maryland many junior investigators in stochastic PDEs.

We also held our first Brin MRC Distinguished Lecture with Ofer Zeitouni (Weizmann Institute & New York University). In addition, the center hosted several visitors, including Anima Nagar (India), Yuichi Goto (Japan), Stefano Luzzatto (Italy), Francoise Pene (France) and Nordine Mir (Qatar). The Brin MRC visitors program is expected to expand over the next several years to showcase the mathematics done at UMD and to increase the collaborative opportunities between UMD faculty and students and the international mathematical community.

In spring 2023, the Brin MRC will host five workshops on rare events, branching processes, disease dynamics, partial hyperbolicy and numerical PDEs. These workshops will be followed by two summer schools for graduate students and junior mathematicians: one on partial hyperbolicity and one on fluid dynamics. 

The Brin MRC advisory board is currently screening the applications for activities in the Academic Year 2023-24. Those workshops, special lectures and summer schools will be announced soon.

For more information on Brin MRC workshops and activities, visit brinmrc.umd.edu.

Pictures of Events

https://brinmrc.umd.edu/aboutus/photogallery.html

Poster Gallery

https://brinmrc.umd.edu/aboutus/postergallery.html