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.”

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