From beach trips with her family to one of the country's top science honors, Strauch found her passion where math meets the ocean.

A campus as landlocked as College Park might seem like an unlikely place to fall in love with the ocean again. But for Jenna Strauch, a sophomore at the University of Maryland pursuing bachelor's degrees in mathematics and atmospheric and oceanic science (AOSC), UMD turned out to be exactly the place where her childhood curiosity for the ocean came back to life.

This year, Strauch was awarded a 2026 Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). One of the most competitive undergraduate honors available to students in the field, the scholarship provides up to $19,000 in financial support, professional development opportunities and a 10-week paid summer internship at any NOAA facility across the United States. Strauch was one of four UMD students in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences this year to receive the scholarship. This class—the second largest ever at UMD—brings the university's total number of Hollings Scholars since 2008 to 55.

"Hollings is such a goal to strive for in our field," said Strauch, who initially could not believe that she was chosen as a recipient. "I honestly thought it was far-fetched that I'd even have a chance, but I feel so honored to be part of this program. Even though plans aren't completely finalized yet, I know that I want to work on projects at the National Ocean Service involving marine ecosystems or coastal resilience."

When Strauch arrived at UMD in 2024 as a freshman mathematics major, she initially had plans to become a math teacher. But she had a hidden passion that she wanted to pursue as well.

"Growing up in Baltimore County, my family would always go to Ocean City every summer," Strauch recalled. "I knew as a kid that I loved the ocean and the shoreline, but I didn't really connect the dots that studying it was a viable path for me. It just seemed so distant from what I thought was possible for me. For a long time, I just assumed I would someday be a math teacher."

That began to change toward the end of her senior year of high school, when Strauch first learned about oceanography as a field of study. By the time she arrived at UMD, the idea had taken hold—and a conversation with the right professor made it real.

Strauch had enrolled in AOSC 200 through UMD's Weather and Climate Carillon Community, a living-learning program that brought her into Professor Tim Canty's classroom. It wasn't her first choice of community going in, but it quickly became her favorite. When Canty asked his students about their long-term goals, Strauch told him she was interested in the ocean. His response was immediate.

"He instantly told me to go talk to him outside of class about it," Strauch said. "It was obvious that he wanted to encourage me to pursue oceanography and that he had an idea how I could get started."

Canty introduced Strauch to Mesoterps, the student-led team behind UMD's Micronet, a distributed network of weather stations positioned across campus. The team collects hyperlocal atmospheric data and shares it with university facilities, emergency management offices and various campus partners—including the university's golf course, which relies on the network for real-time wind speed and direction readings. The Mesoterps team also works with facilities management on ongoing efforts to better understand rainfall patterns and their relationship to flooding risk in older campus buildings. 

For Canty, watching Strauch grow into the field has been a source of pride.

"I first met Jenna through my Carillon community, and I was thrilled to learn she would be adding AOSC as a second degree," Canty said. "She is incredibly talented, and I look forward to following her career and seeing the great things she accomplishes."

When Strauch officially joined the Micronet project in September 2024, she had no prior experience with this kind of work. But before long, her tasks included migrating the team's data infrastructure to a new server, troubleshooting Raspberry Pi computers when they went unexpectedly offline and performing routine maintenance on equipment spread across campus—work that was messier and more technical than anything she had ever encountered in a classroom.

The experience also opened Strauch's eyes to many aspects of fieldwork and research that she hadn't expected. Working remotely with sensors and mini-computers helped her see that she could uniquely apply her math skills in a highly modern, technological context. And seeing how many people across campus—especially outside of AOSC—were genuinely invested in what her team was doing only motivated her more.

Looking to the future, Strauch plans to take on a larger role with the Micronet team and hopes to pass on the same kind of knowledge she developed to new students in the group. She also enrolled in a physical oceanography course next semester, taught by Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Assistant Professor Jacob Wenegrat, as a more concrete step toward fulfilling her dreams of attending graduate school and becoming an oceanographer.

"I've just learned so much since I started working with the Micronet—things that I never would have learned just from taking classes—and I know that it'll still be a big part of my academic life here at UMD for the next few years," Strauch said. "I think that experience is what got me here, and I'm excited to see where it all leads."

Through multidisciplinary partnerships and a bit of weather science, Elana Fertig (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, applied mathematics & statistics, and scientific computation) aims to make cancer a predictable and manageable disease.

Elana Fertig (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, applied mathematics & statistics, and scientific computation) sees clear parallels between predicting the weather and forecasting cancer progression. Her landmark research involves using computational methods to identify cellular and molecular mechanisms of carcinogenesis and therapeutic resistance from a vast trove of multiplatform genomics data. 

After graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park, she spent 16 years as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, building a transdisciplinary lab and authoring over 130 research publications. 

In 2024, she was recruited to serve as director of the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM). She is also a professor in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, associate director for quantitative science at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMGCCC) at the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS), and a faculty member at the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing (UM-IHC). 

In this interview with UMD’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, Fertig discusses her leadership roles, the value of partnerships and how applying weather science to cancer research may lead to bluer skies in human health. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Please describe your current roles.

I was recruited in 2024 to direct the IGS at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. IGS grew out of early genome sequencing efforts and is now a hub for genomics and computational biology at UMSOM. My role is to build on that foundation—advancing and applying genomics technologies and interpreting huge datasets mathematically.

I also serve as associate director for quantitative science at UMGCCC, where I help build computational programs and infrastructure for modern cancer research. We partner across the University of Maryland system, especially through UM-IHC, through which we’re working to better connect efforts between Baltimore and College Park, particularly in computational biology and artificial intelligence (AI).

What kinds of scientific questions are you trying to answer?

I often describe it as building a weather forecasting system for tumors. We want to move beyond averages and instead say: Given where your tumor is right now, this is the best treatment, here’s how it may evolve, and here’s how we’ll monitor it. Cancer is dynamic—it’s constantly changing—so we need to understand where it’s going, not just where it is.

You didn’t start out in biology—how did that shift happen?

As an undergraduate, I didn’t thrive in the hypercompetitive premedical environments, and memorizing biological details didn’t come naturally to me. I was drawn instead to the logic of mathematics and the collaboration that its complex questions demand.

What drew me to Maryland was that people were applying math to real-world data and problems. I came to study applied math, focusing on nonlinear and fluid dynamics—work closely tied to weather prediction. 

My graduate training was deeply collaborative. I worked with an interdisciplinary team, with Brian Hunt [Professor Emeritus of Mathematics with a joint appointment in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology] as my primary advisor. Through a NASA fellowship, I helped integrate satellite and weather balloon data into atmospheric models. That experience with combining different types of data shaped my approach going forward.

At that time, researchers were beginning to generate large-scale biological datasets that needed mathematicians to interpret. I realized the tools we used for weather prediction could apply to biology—especially the complexity of cancer biology and therapeutic resistance.

To expand my skills, I entered a postdoc in computational biology, and I was struck by how much we still don’t understand. In weather, you know the equations from well-established laws of fluid dynamics. In biology, we’re still grappling with what the variables even are. That complexity hooked me.

Much of my work now focuses on making sense of extremely high-dimensional data—measuring thousands of genes across millions of cells—and identifying what actually matters. We look for the key variables driving the system and how they change over time, particularly in cancer progression and treatment resistance.

What’s an example of a problem you’re working on?

We work a lot on pancreatic cancer. For example, many people develop precancerous lesions that never progress, so a key question is: Why do some become cancer while others don’t?

Another challenge is that much of a pancreatic tumor isn’t made up of tumor cells. It includes other cells that block the immune system. If we can figure out how the tumor shuts down the immune response, we may be able to design therapies that turn it back on.

What would a cancer “forecast” mean for patients?

It would shift cancer care away from one-time predictions based on averages, moving toward precision medicine, predictive medicine. The goal is to make cancer manageable over time, more like a chronic disease. In some cancers, like breast cancer, we’re already seeing that shift. There’s also a psychological benefit when you give patients a clearer sense of what to expect.

How is it being back in Maryland? 

It’s been very meaningful. It was humbling to step into the role previously held by Claire Fraser—even finding a pair of her shoes under my desk on my first day.

Maryland has a unique combination of strengths in nonlinear dynamics, genomics and predictive modeling—exactly what’s needed to build a tumor forecasting system. It’s the perfect place to deliver on the promise of these technologies.

What’s always stood out to me about Maryland is its emphasis on interdisciplinary work and real-world problems. You’re part of a larger effort to solve meaningful challenges, supported by connections to federal agencies, multiple campuses and a broad scientific community.

IGS already serves as a hub for systems biology across areas like cancer, infectious disease, aging and neurogenomics. I want to continue advancing new molecular profiling technologies and expanding their application. A big part of that is building bridges—across disciplines, campuses and partnerships like ours with the UM-IHC.

What has surprised you most in your career?

How quickly the technology has evolved! When I was in graduate school, the human genome hadn’t even been fully sequenced. Now measuring it is routine. And there were things that people told me would never be possible—like being able to measure all the cells in a tumor over time—and now we can do that.

How does your work connect to who you were as a kid?

It’s always felt like solving a puzzle. I loved puzzles growing up—jigsaw puzzles, logic problems—that’s just how my mind works. And this work feels like that, just at a different scale.

It’s also all about adapting and changing, as we do through our lives. Scientific puzzles and the tools are always evolving—the ability to keep learning is what lets you move between fields and keep up.

For this puzzle, we’re trying to piece together something incredibly complex. But I’ve learned that if you follow the logic step by step, eventually a beautifully clear picture starts to emerge.

Read more about the members of our community who have been honored recently for their outstanding contributions to the university and the field of mathematics.

Faculty

• Larry Washington receieves the  Kirwan Undergraduate Award
• Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner is the winner the 2025 Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems.
• The 2026 International Congress of Mathematics invited speakers:
  
  • Dima Dolgopyat - plenary speaker
  • Adam Kanigowski, Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner, and Uri Bader - invited speakers
    
  • Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner, Yu Gu, and Vince Lyzinski promoted to Professor
• Artem Chernikov awarded the Bessel Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation

Students

•  Hibiki Kato Dynamics Days US 2026 Poster Presentation Award and Student Conference Travel Award