How alum Thomas Geisler transitioned from the U.S. Army to the University of Maryland and a career as a software engineer

In 2013, when many of his friends from the Baltimore area were finishing college or starting their careers, Thomas Geisler found himself in a very different place: a combat zone. In Laghman Province, Afghanistan, even the weather was like nothing Geisler had ever experienced—and not in a good way.

“I was in such a dusty place in Afghanistan that when it rained the raindrops would collect dirt on the way down,” Geisler recalled. “I don’t know how many people can say that they’ve gotten caught in a mud rainstorm, but I have, and it’s not pleasant.”

Geisler (B.S. ’21, mathematics; B.S. ’21, computer science) served seven years as an intelligence analyst and Arabic translator in the U.S. Army, with assignments in the U.S., Afghanistan and Germany. Soon after he left the military, he enrolled at the University of Maryland, where he discovered a passion for mathematics and later, computer science.

Thanks to his UMD coursework and internships and his boundless interest in math, problem-solving and more, Geisler forged a career path that meshed his love for science with the intelligence experience he gained in the Army. Now he’s taking his skills to the next level as a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), a position he calls “ideal.”

“I love it. To be honest, I couldn’t ask for anything more,” Geisler said. “Because it has a lot of government contracting, it’s very rewarding and I feel like it’s a career where every day I feel like I make an impact.”

Always reading, relentlessly curious

Geisler grew up in south Baltimore, Maryland. A quiet, introverted kid, he was always reading and relentlessly curious.

“I remember my parents getting frustrated with me taking things apart and putting them back together,” Geisler recalled. “I think I messed with a vacuum cleaner once that never quite got fixed. I was always interested in everything, always tinkering around.”

After high school, Geisler enrolled at Ohio State University, the first in his family to go to college. But once he got there, he had trouble finding his way.

“I was just completely lost, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Geisler recalled. “I must have changed majors four or five times, I was in business, and then economics and then I wanted to do languages, then I wanted to do social sciences. And believe it or not, the one thing that I never got into was hard science. The interest was there but I never really thought about doing it.”

After two frustrating years, Geisler decided it was time to change course. He started thinking seriously about joining the military.

“It seemed like an opportunity to step back and put a pause on big things like school and finding a career and reset my life,” he explained. “I was 13 when 9/11 happened and then in my teenage years, you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about Iraq or Afghanistan. I had friends that enlisted, and it just seemed like something I could do beyond subtle patriotism.”

In 2009, Geisler came home from Ohio State for winter break and never went back.

“I was staying with my parents for Christmas,” he recalled. “And this may sound sort of fantastical, but I remember that it was the first thing that I told my parents Christmas morning. I said, ‘Hey, I’m joining the Army.’ There were two wars going on at the time.”

Deployed to Afghanistan

After basic training in Missouri, the Army sent Geisler to language school in California to learn Arabic, then on to Louisiana to build his analytical skills before he deployed to Afghanistan in 2013.

“It was scary, to be frank, but the anticipation of going there was harder to deal with than actually being there,” he said. “You don’t ever know what’s going to happen.”

In Afghanistan, Geisler tracked insurgent networks to identify significant threats to U.S. personnel.

“I was working the military intelligence mission while I was in Afghanistan,” Geisler explained.
“I was focusing a lot on IED networks, analyzing networks of people that were building and implanting and detonating explosive devices.”

In 2014, after nearly a year in Afghanistan, Geisler came back to the U.S. and then deployed to Germany as a signals intelligence analyst, using his Arabic language skills extensively and identifying threats to U.S. embassies, consulates and others.

Geisler completed his military service in 2017, and headed back home to Maryland to start a new chapter in his life. He applied to UMD, thinking he might major in engineering. But a few prerequisite courses later, everything changed.

“I started doing all the math classes and it just hit me—I realized this was the direction I wanted to go in,” Geisler recalled. “I walked over to the mathematics building and declared a math major.”

Geisler remembers reading book after book on the history of mathematics and the fundamentals of mathematical proof and spending hours picking professors’ brains about their research. Along the way, he developed a deep appreciation for the mechanics and the certainty of problem-solving.

“What I love about mathematics is that many problems can be solved in a variety of different ways,” he explained. “How someone solves a particular problem says a lot about their strengths and weaknesses, and no matter how a problem is solved, mathematics as an extension of formal logic prescribes a method of being absolutely certain that a solution is correct.”

While Geisler advanced his knowledge of math and later added a computer science major, he also volunteered with veterans groups on campus, grateful for the support they had given him.

“Coming back to school as a 27-year-old, I didn’t think I would fit in, but the veteran community at Maryland was awesome, they were absolutely instrumental in helping me acclimate,” Geisler said. “My time at UMD was very much the defining characteristic of this big transition from being in the Army to having a civilian career.”

As time went on, Geisler began to see how the analytical skills he learned in the Army could mesh with his new skill set in mathematical calculations and software development, and he thought APL might be a place where he could apply both. Two summer internships convinced him he was right.

“In my first internship at APL, I was doing a lot of background research for new contracts, then I got another internship the summer of ’21 and I was writing software for projects that were very important to the U.S. intelligence community,” Geisler explained. “In a way, it really mirrored everything I was doing when I was in the Army.”

By the time Geisler graduated in December 2021, he accepted a full-time opportunity as a software engineer at APL. Now he’s developing software for microcontroller and RF geolocation systems, applying the skills he learned at UMD every day.

“Calculus and number theory are essential to much of the work I do, and I use that and many things I learned at UMD on a daily basis,” Geisler said. “Mathematics isn't just about solving esoteric problems; it offers a method of understanding problems and assuring that a solution is grounded in facts and appropriate logical conclusion. At work I often find myself stopping to ask whether I've drawn a logical conclusion or if I've just been sloppy.”

Geisler has come a long way from that dusty combat zone in Afghanistan. Settled down with his wife in Sykesville, Maryland, he looks ahead to the challenges at APL and hopes to go to graduate school someday. And although he may not have taken the traditional path to get here, he’s exactly where he wants to be.

“Despite the fact that I never really had a clear plan starting out and I didn’t necessarily do things with a clear goal in mind, I couldn’t be happier with how it’s all worked out,” Geisler reflected. “I’m proud of my military service, I’m proud to have gone to UMD, I’m just really happy.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Viray (B.S. ’05) is a professor at the University of Washington.

Bianca Viray, a professor at the University of Washington (UMD 2005), has been awarded the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars for the 2022–2023 academic year. The fellowship gives exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion is the excellence of the candidate's research.

An arithmetic geometer, Viray researches rational points on varieties, particularly how a variety’s geometric properties influence failures of the local-to-global principle. “My research projects are broadly motivated by wanting to understand arithmetic properties of a variety as we extend the base field, and what the sets of points look like over extensions,” she said.

Recently, Viray has studied degree d points, considering solubility over unions of extensions of bounded or prescribed degree. During her fellowship year, she will take part in a program on Diophantine geometry at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Viray will also host collaborators including Brendan Creutz of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).

“I am honored to be awarded this prestigious fellowship in recognition of my research and thankful for my many wonderful mentors, collaborators, and colleagues who have supported me through my career,” she said.

Viray earned her PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley. She was at Brown University from 2010 until 2014 as a Tamarkin Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 2014. In the 2021–2022 academic year, she is a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An active organizer in the mathematics community, Viray is a co-founder of the paraDIGMS (Diversity in Graduate Mathematical Sciences) initiative and a member of the board of directors of Girls’ Angle. She is also a member at large of the AMS Council and a Fellow of the AMS. Read a Simons Foundation profile of Viray, who was named a 2020 Simons Fellow in Mathematics.

About the Fellowship

The AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars, established in 2017 with a gift from Joan and Joseph Birman, seeks to address the paucity of women at the highest levels of research in mathematics by giving exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion for the Birman Fellowship is the excellence of the candidate's research. See past recipients and read about their experiences with the fellowship (PDF).

Contact: AMS Communications.

*****

The American Mathematical Society is dedicated to advancing research and connecting the diverse global mathematical community through our publications, meetings and conferences, MathSciNet, professional services, advocacy, and awareness programs.

This article was copied from AMS News: https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6982

Seniors Steven Jin and Naveen Raman from the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) have been awarded 2022 Winston Churchill Scholarships, which offers them full funding to pursue a one-year master’s degree at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. The scholarship, valued at around $60,000, covers all educational fees and provides living and travel allowances.

“Steven and Naveen have both demonstrated a sustained commitment to research, leadership and service,” said CMNS Dean Amitabh Varshney. “I join their mentors and the entire Terp community in congratulating them on being named Churchill Scholars. We couldn't be more proud of them!”

Nationally, 16 students in the sciences, engineering or mathematics received Churchill Scholarships this year out of 110 nominations from 73 participating institutions. Seven UMD students have been nominated in the past five years—and all of them have been named Churchill Scholars. 

“Lighting doesn’t usually strike twice in a competition as fierce as the Churchill, but Steven and Naveen are forces of nature and this extraordinary twin success is testament to their hard work, talent and ambition,” said Richard Bell, a UMD professor of history who serves as the university’s faculty advisor for United Kingdom fellowships. 

Steven Jin

Jin, a mathematics major, is interested in arithmetic algebraic geometry (where number theory and geometry come together) and geometric representation theory (which seeks to study symmetry by using techniques from geometry). He has published two papers, had a third paper recently accepted, and given 11 oral presentations at research conferences and 25 expository talks.

Steven Jin. Photo courtesy of same.

The Churchill Scholarship will allow Jin to pursue his Master of Advanced Study degree (also known as Part III of the Mathematical Tripos) at the University of Cambridge. After his time there, Jin plans to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics.

“I am interested in a modern research program called the Langlands Program, which describes a broad web of research threads that aim to unite certain concepts across fields like number theory, algebraic geometry and even Fourier analysis,” Jin said. “I have been introduced to many of these research threads via graduate courses, reading courses and working seminars, and I am learning to navigate the associated literature through my honors thesis work.”

At UMD, he has worked with Mathematics Professor Lawrence Washington on elliptic curve analogues of classical lower bounds on the least primitive root of a prime. This work resolves a variation of a well-studied question about the integers, recast to the modern context of arithmetic algebraic geometry. With his departmental honors thesis advisor, Mathematics Professor Thomas Haines, Jin is working to develop a theory of Rapoport-Zink local models for split reductive groups over arbitrary function fields. If successful, this work will grant researchers in the field certain representation-theoretic machinery that was previously restricted only to special cases.

“Steven Jin is an extremely energetic, passionate and devoted student of mathematics,” Haines said. “He is unusually broadly informed for an undergraduate student and is currently functioning like a mid-career graduate student.”

Jin has also participated in research experiences for undergraduates (REU) programs for the last three summers. At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2019, he used techniques from analytic number theory and harmonic analysis to produce new bounds for numerous classes of exponential sums. In 2020, at Kent State University, Jin used techniques from noncommutative ring theory and combinatorics to unify and generalize pre-existing results on the Behrens radical properties of noncommutative rings. He spent this past summer at the University of Virginia using techniques from analytic and algebraic number theory to exhibit the first completely explicit and unconditional effective bounds in the error term for the Sato-Tate conjecture. 

Jin has received the UMD Department of Mathematics’ Strauss Scholarship, Dan Shanks Award in computational number theory, Higginbotham Award and several travel grants to speak at research conferences. He was also awarded a Maryland Summer Scholars grant. 

Outside the classroom, he speaks to students in high school math clubs in Howard County, Maryland, where he grew up and attended Mount Hebron High School. He has also tutored dozens of middle and high school students as they prepared for the SAT, ACT and AP exams, and he trained students for the American Math Competition. He also helped inmates in Howard County prepare for the mathematics GED test. 

As a residence hall president, assistant vice president of academic affairs for the SGA, and SGA representative to the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center advisory committee, Jin spearheaded a number of projects, such as expanding study spaces across campus, promoting textbook affordability and increasing internship-related travel support.

Naveen Raman

Raman, a computer science and mathematics double major, began working with UMD computer science faculty members in 2018. Since then, he has authored or co-authored seven conference papers on topics at the intersection of computer science, economics and social good.

Naveen Raman. Photo courtesy of same.

The Churchill Scholarship will allow Raman to work with Jon Crowcroft, the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, on his M.Phil. in computer science. He plans to focus on the fairness of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms in critical fields such as criminal justice, job markets and health care. After his time in Cambridge, Raman plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science.

“For graduate school, I plan to study how AI and ML systems can work for social good through applications to health care and social networks,” Raman said. “AI and ML have the potential to revolutionize health care through improvements in clinical prognosis, but predicting patient outcomes and diseases is especially challenging for patients from marginalized communities due to data sparsity and bias. I plan to combat these problems by developing robust learning algorithms that work in the presence of data perturbations and minimize error rates.”

Raman began using intelligent computing to improve the utility and fairness of human systems with Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science Aravind Srinivasan and former Computer Science Assistant Professor Max Leiserson. He worked with them to develop algorithms to identify cancer mutation signatures before moving on to working with Computer Science Assistant Professor John Dickerson to develop policies that balance fairness and profit in ride-pooling systems.

He also works with Computer Science Associate Professor Jordan Boyd-Graber to improve question answering systems by leveraging data from trivia competitions. Raman’s focus is on advancing so-called named entity linking algorithms, which connect names found in a question to larger repositories of data about them like Wikipedia. These advances will ultimately help question answering systems perform better on a diverse set of questions.

In summer 2019, Raman worked to detect rudeness, toxicity and burnout in open-source communities as a participant in Carnegie Mellon University’s Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering program. Two summers ago, he worked at Facebook to develop a user interface for debugging machine learning models and learned about important societal issues that machine learning can help solve, such as hate speech detection. Last summer, he worked at MIT Lincoln Labs to improve human-artificial intelligence collaboration. This semester, he is working at the World Resources Institute as part of the Electric School Bus Initiative.

“Naveen is working at the forefront of a broad portfolio of fields—software engineering with his CMU colleagues, natural language processing with Jordan Boyd-Graber here at UMD, computer vision with his MIT Lincoln Labs colleagues, and 'EconCS' meets fairness in AI with me,” Dickerson said. “He is at the beginning of what will, without a doubt, be a storied and impactful career.”

Raman, who attended Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland, is a member of the Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students in the Honors College and the Global Fellows program. He is also a Goldwater Scholar, President’s Scholar, Philip Merrill Presidential Scholar and a Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher finalist. He has been awarded the Brendan Iribe Endowed Scholarship, Capital One Bank Dean’s Scholarship in Computer Science and Corporate Partners in Computing Scholarship.

An active competitor, Raman’s team won the National Academy Quiz Tournaments’ Division 2 Intercollegiate Championship Tournament during his freshman year. In 2020, he and two classmates received an honorable mention award in the 72-hour Mathematical Contest in Modeling for their project that analyzed the effect that rising global temperatures have on herring and mackerel fishing along the Scottish coast. He also received an outstanding award in the 2020 SIMIODE Challenge Using Differential Equations Modeling for his team’s work on modeling interactions in refugee camps.

He has been a teaching assistant for a programming languages class and the lead student instructor for a class on algorithms for coding interviews. 

Off campus, Raman teaches math skills to underprivileged elementary school students in the Maryland Mentor Program and previously volunteered at the College Park Academy charter school helping students improve their math skills.