Yuan will take the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In high school, many students are drawn to competitive sports. Some play football, some play basketball or lacrosse. Linden Yuan’s sport was math.

“In high school I participated in math competitions. I found math fun. I would have to answer a series of math questions individually under a certain amount of time,” he said.

Yuan, a senior mathematics major, carried his passion for math with him throughout his time at the University of Maryland. When he isn’t in his math classes, he reads books about math for fun.

“I love math because mathematics gives us the power to formulate precise statements of vague or complicated ideas,” he said. “We can also use math to design detailed and sophisticated ways to answer questions.”

Yuan has been doing that during his research experiences at UMD, including investigating queueing theory with Smith Chair of Management Science Michael Fu in the Robert H. Smith School of Business, examining machine learning techniques with the Mathematics Professor Wojciech Czaja, and analyzing data from high-energy physics in the Honors seminar, "Cracking the Secrets of the Universe with Computers," where he worked with Physics Professor Kaustubh Agashe.

Yuan will continue his research career in graduate school, thanks to the Department of Defense’s National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship he received. The program, established in 1989 by direction of Congress and sponsored by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, serves as a means to increase the number of citizens trained in science and engineering disciplines of military importance. 

Landing this fellowship reminded Yuan of the mathematics competitions he participated in over the years. But this time, his competition was the rest of the nation. The NDSEG fellowship is highly competitive, having awarded just over 4,000 fellowships out of 60,000-plus applications since the program’s inception. 

Yuan will be taking his fellowship to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he will pursue a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering. The fellowship will support him for three years and pays for full tuition and all mandatory fees; it also offers a monthly stipend and travel expenses.

“I’m so thankful for this opportunity and the freedom that this fellowship offers me,” Yuan said. “Now I don’t have to worry about paying for school or finding a job. I only have to focus on my research.”

Yuan will study information flow on complex mathematical networks for his Ph.D. research. 

“Imagine someone starts spreading information from a given point in the network. Then, you make observations at other points, farther away in the network,” he explained. “Using these observations, what can you say about the original starting point? I'll be using tools from electrical engineering and discrete probability to answer that question.”

Because math is Yuan’s favorite sport, an opportunity like this is like going to the championship. He looks forward to seeing his mathematical research make a difference in a real-life scenario.

“My application for the fellowship included a research proposal where the Department of Defense saw real-world value in my work,” Yuan said. “I’m so grateful that the fellowship allows me to do the research that I want to do and that it can be applied to real life.”

Written by Chelsea Torres

The scholarship encourages students to pursue advanced study and research careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics.

University of Maryland junior Naveen Raman was awarded a scholarship this year by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, which encourages students to pursue advanced study and research careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics.

Raman is a computer science and mathematics double major who is also a member of the Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students in the Honors College. 

Raman was among the 410 Barry Goldwater Scholars selected from 1,256 students nominated nationally this year. Goldwater Scholars receive one- or two-year scholarships that cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to $7,500 per year. These scholarships are a stepping-stone to future support for the students’ research careers. The Goldwater Foundation has honored 73 UMD winners and five honorable mentions since the program’s first award was given in 1989.

Raman, who is a President’s Scholarship recipient from Derwood, Maryland, began working with UMD computer science faculty members in 2018. Since then, he has published four papers and submitted a fifth for publication.

He began by developing algorithms to identify cancer mutation signatures with Distinguished University Professor Aravind Srinivasan and former Assistant Professor Max Leiserson and moved on to working with Assistant Professor John Dickerson to develop policies that balance fairness and profit in ride-pooling systems.

He’s also currently working with 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.

“Naveen Raman is a clear star researcher—and practitioner—in the making,” Dickerson said. “He is driven, questioning, curious and technically talented, as well as a young adult with a strong sense of civic duty and commitment to using technology for social good.”

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. Last summer, 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.

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. He also serves as vice president of UMD’s Puzzle Club.

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

He has been awarded the Brendan Iribe Endowed Scholarship, Capital One Bank Dean’s Scholarship in Computer Science and Corporate Partners in Computing Scholarship.

Raman plans to attend graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, with a focus on the fairness of artificial intelligence algorithms in critical fields such as criminal justice, job markets and health care.

Written by Abby Robinson

Tasha Inniss (Ph.D. ’00) and her classmates Sherry Scott and Kimberly Weems were the first Black female mathematicians to earn doctorates from UMD.

Tasha Inniss didn’t plan to make history when she began pursuing her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Maryland in 1995, but she ended up doing just that. In 2000, Inniss and two of her classmates—Sherry Scott and Kimberly Weems—became the first group of Black female mathematicians to earn Ph.D.s from UMD. Inniss and Weems earned their doctorates in applied mathematics and Scott earned hers in mathematics. 

“As I was submitting my paperwork for graduation, the woman processing it said, ‘I think you might be the first Black woman to get a Ph.D. in math from Maryland,’” Inniss recalled. “I didn’t believe it at first, but once it got closer and closer to graduation, we found out that it was true." 

Inniss, a New Orleans native, loved math as a child and later discovered she enjoys helping others understand math.

“I’ve loved math since the fourth grade. It was fun to me, like putting together a puzzle,” she said. “When I went to college, my friends used to ask me to help them with math, and that was when I realized I was good at helping people understand it. So, it was around then that I decided that I wanted to teach math on the college level, and I needed a Ph.D. to do that.”

Inniss went to college at Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically Black Catholic university in the country.

“Xavier is a family school. My aunts and uncles went to Xavier, and my Uncle Clarence is a mathematician and taught in the math department long before I got there,” she said. “I applied to many schools, but once I attended a summer program at Xavier, I knew it was where I needed to be. It felt like home.”

After graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Xavier in 1993, Inniss earned her master’s degree in applied mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

“Applied math is where my heart is,” Inniss explained. “I really wanted to do math that helped the world. With operations research and optimization, parts of applied math, it's all about modeling real-world systems to make them better, which is why I love it.”

When Inniss began looking for Ph.D. programs to apply to, one of her friends encouraged her to consider UMD.

“One of my friends who I went to Xavier with had gone to Maryland and said that I should consider the school and that they were really supportive of Black students there,” she said. “I also met the chair of the department, Raymond Johnson, who is an African American man, at a conference for Black mathematicians and he was really passionate about helping people learn and understand math. I said to myself, ‘If he is the chair of the department, then it is probably a really good place to learn.’”

When Inniss arrived in College Park, she was pleased to find such a large community of Black math graduate students.

“There were at least 20 of us, if I recall correctly, and we had a great community,” Inniss said. “We would hold study groups and prepare for our qualifying exams together. We supported each other to help us get to the final prize of our receiving Ph.D.s. in mathematics.”

Johnson was also a huge part of why Black students felt supported in the math department, Inniss recalled.

“Dr. Johnson was the reason why we were all there,” she said. “He was very intentional about diversifying the department and recruiting Black students. Once a month he would hold open dialogue sessions with students to see how things were going and how the department could improve. He was someone that we trusted, so we felt we could be honest and transparent with our feedback.”

As Inniss reached the end of her Ph.D. studies, Scott and Weems were finishing up theirs as well.

“We didn’t plan for it to happen this way, but we actually ended up defending our theses within one week of each other,” she said. “When we got to the end, I thought ‘Wow, we’re really going to finish together and we’re going to be the first Black women to do this.’ We had no idea in the beginning that it was going to be historic.”

After graduating from Maryland, Inniss went on to have an impressive career in mathematics. In 2001, she was appointed the Clare Boothe Luce Professor of Mathematics at Trinity Washington University (then Trinity College) in D.C. The Clare Boothe Luce Program awards annual grants to support professorships and scholarships for women in the sciences and mathematics. After three years at Trinity, Inniss landed her dream job.

“My dream job has always been to teach at Spelman College,” she explained. “Spelman has such a rich legacy and I loved having the opportunity to not only teach math to fellow Black women, but also prepare them for life as mathematicians outside of Spelman.”

Inniss enjoyed exposing students to the beauty of operations research and optimization and its interesting real-world applications.

“Some of my students went on to do amazing projects using applied mathematics, such as how to optimize the schedules for the campus tour guides and creating an evacuation model for the city of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina,” she recalled. “I loved teaching at Spelman. I had the chance to mentor students and expose them to the beautiful parts of math. It was an amazing experience.”

After nearly a decade, Inniss took leave from teaching at Spelman for an opportunity she couldn’t pass up: doing a rotation at the National Science Foundation (NSF), first as a program director and later as a deputy division director (in acting capacity). After that, she was named founding director of education and industry outreach at INFORMS, an international association for professionals in analytics and operations research. She returned to Spelman in 2018.

“I had the opportunity to come back to Spelman and now I'm the associate provost for research,” Inniss said. “I am able to take all of the things I learned at NSF regarding competitive grants and grant writing and use it to help my faculty colleagues and fund undergraduate research here now. It is all coming full circle. Although I don’t get to teach math anymore, I still love math and I still get to do things that will impact and help students.”

As for the next generation of Black female mathematicians, Inniss wants them to know that as long as they truly love math, they can succeed.

“I firmly believe that what you pursue should be your passion,” she said. “You have to be excited about what you're doing because there will be challenges, but you can do it with support, prayer and hard work.”

Written by Chelsea Torres