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

How Lee Mendelowitz (M.S. ’12, Ph.D. ’15) stepped up to the plate to become the director of baseball research for the Washington Nationals.

Lee Mendelowitz has had a passion for Major League Baseball since he was a kid. But now when he watches a game, he’s looking for a lot more than runs, hits and errors. 

“I used to just watch the game. Now it feels like I’m watching the game within the game,” he said. “There are just so many more details to pay attention to.”

Mendelowitz isn’t just any baseball fan, though, he’s the director of baseball research for the Washington Nationals. And with both a master’s and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland’s applied mathematics & statistics, and scientific computation (AMSC) program, he understands the value of every little detail. Whether it’s the speed and trajectory of a pitch, the positioning of players on the field or even the parameters of a particular umpire’s strike zone, Mendelowitz’s job is all about crunching the numbers to help his team win. 

“Baseball is like any business where there are decisions to be made and you want to use all the information you have available to make the best decisions,” Mendelowitz explained. “We’re in the business of trying to win baseball games, so we want to use all the data we have available to try to make those decisions.”

Growing up a Yankees fan

Mendelowitz grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, rooting for the Yankees and going to games with his dad and his brothers.

“I have a distinct memory of 1996,” he recalled. “I was 10 years old and that was Derek Jeter’s rookie year, and the team went on to win the World Series. And that was the year I really became a Yankees fan and a baseball fan. We went to plenty of Yankees games and that was a big part of my upbringing.”

At school, mathematics and science came easily to Mendelowitz, and they quickly became his favorite subjects. 

“There was a point around seventh grade where I realized I was good at math and I was good at physics and other sciences. It all just came naturally to me,” Mendelowitz said. “I realized I was more interested and engaged than other people in the classroom, and it continued from there.”

Pursuing a calling

From math and physics to computer science, Mendelowitz saw his interests coming together through high school. In 2004, he went to Cornell University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in applied physics. Then, in 2008, he accepted an entry-level systems engineering position at Raytheon Technologies in Massachusetts. 

“I was working as a software engineer in the modeling and simulation group,” Mendelowitz said. “We’d write software to model different situations with this Navy project we were working on, which was kind of interesting.”

But he couldn’t stop thinking about an applied math course that captured his interest while he was at Cornell.

“It was a nonlinear dynamics course taught by Professor Steve Strogatz,” Mendelowitz recalled. “It was all about mathematical modeling with differential equations and complex behaviors that can arise from simple sets of equations. I found that fascinating. And I felt a calling—I wanted to go back to school and pursue applied math.”

Mendelowitz and his then-girlfriend, now wife, Diana Cohn, decided to coordinate their search for graduate schools, and the D.C. area was on the list. While she looked at law schools, he applied to the AMSC program at UMD.

“The thing I really liked about the program was the flexibility it offered and the broad scope of applied math research going on at AMSC,” Mendelowitz said. “I really hadn’t made up my mind at this point about what I wanted to pursue for graduate research other than that I knew I wanted it to involve math and programming.”

Python programs and escalator breakdowns

Mendelowitz earned his master’s degree in 2012 and stayed at Maryland for his Ph.D. It was during that time, in 2013, that he developed an interest in a general-purpose programming language called Python. And just for fun, he used it to launch an ambitious side project: tracking escalator breakdowns in the D.C. Metro system. He called it DC Metro Metrics.

“The initial idea I had was to build this Twitter bot that would tweet every time that an escalator stopped working in the D.C. Metrorail system,” Mendelowitz explained. “I was living in D.C., so I was taking Metro to commute every day back and forth to College Park. When you’re commuting, it‘s especially annoying when escalators don’t work and you have to walk up three stories. So, I thought this would be fun and no one else had done anything like it.”

Due to popular demand, he added elevator outages and other information to the escalator breakdowns, posting it all on a website—dcmetrometrics.com. Interest from the public and the press just kept growing.

“We were getting hundreds of page views a day,” Mendelowitz said. “And I did get a lot of emails, too. Some people really relied on it, which kind of surprised me—people who had disabilities who were trying to navigate the Metro system were looking at my website to view the latest outages instead of using the website that Metro provided. It was a fun learning experience because it was the first time that I’d deployed code to the cloud and made use of a database system.”

He kept dcmetrometrics.com up and running for several years until he no longer had the time or energy to maintain it. 

Bringing baseball back into focus

Meanwhile, Mendelowitz moved ahead with his Ph.D., researching software algorithms that work with a particular type of genomic mapping data. He planned to continue his research through the summer of 2014, until he attended a D.C. data science meetup that unexpectedly brought baseball back into focus. During the meetup, Sam Mondry-Cohen, now assistant general manager of baseball R&D with the Washington Nationals, announced an internship opportunity with the team that just happened to fit Mendelowitz’s applied mathematics and data science skillset. He applied and ended up getting the job.

“I remember I had to be talked into the internship a little bit,” he admitted. “I was on the fence because I was concerned about whether it would be a good decision for my professional development. Here I am trying to wrap up my Ph.D. and I take two-and-a-half or three months off to work in baseball, is that going to set me back in my Ph.D. work? I really was not sure, but the experience ended up being incredible.”

For Mendelowitz, it was an opportunity to look at baseball in ways he never had before—using what he’d learned to see the game from the inside.

“I worked on a project where I was modeling the strike zone of each umpire,” Mendelowitz recalled. “For each umpire it’s slightly different—some are friendlier to the pitchers where they call more strikes, some are friendlier to hitters where they call less strikes, but going even further than that, each umpire has a slightly different shape to their strike zone. Given the location of each pitch and who the umpire was, we can then start to model, using predictive models, what each umpire’s strike zone looks like. It was a great learning experience.”

After the internship ended, Mendelowitz stayed with the Nationals as a consultant and after completing his Ph.D. in 2015, he went to work for the team full time as an analyst. By this time, the Nationals and other major league teams had more data to work with than ever before thanks to StatCast, MLB’s player tracking system.

“Now we know where the ball is at all times, we know how players are positioned and moving on the field, so if there’s a line drive to center field and a player has to make a very athletic play to make the catch, we have all these metrics on that play,” he explained. “We know how hard the ball was hit, and in what direction, we know how far the ball traveled, we know how quickly the center fielder reacted and the route he took to try to make the play. The ultimate goal is to use this kind of information to make decisions that translate to wins on the field.”

“I’m still not sure how it happened”

For Mendelowitz, being part of the Nationals’ day-to-day operations is an experience beyond anything he could have imagined—working at the ballpark, going to games and contributing to the success of the team all year-round. Though he always loved baseball, he never considered the possibility of a job in the major leagues until it was right in front of him.

“The truth is no, I really did not ever consider a career in baseball,” he admitted. “I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I want to work in baseball.’ I just thought I’m going to continue being a baseball fan and I’m going to work in data science R&D somewhere else. I didn’t realize that teams were really hiring in this area. And even if they were, there are only 30 teams and I didn’t even know how many jobs would be available. I’m still not sure how it happened, but I’m glad it did.”

Now, after five years with the Nationals—including the thrill of being part of the team’s World Series win in 2019—he is hard pressed to think of a job that would be a better fit. It may not be a career path he expected, but to this lifelong baseball fan, it feels like a home run.

“I feel really lucky. I remember just the randomness of how this all came together,” he said. “I was lucky to get the internship, lucky to get a full-time offer and the Nationals deciding there’s a role for people like me to work in baseball. It’s really a blessing. I feel very fortunate and grateful, that’s for sure.”