Hobson wins first prize
Hobson wins first prize
Congratulations to undergraduate student Gabrielle Hobson, who won first prize in the student poster contest at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics annual meeting. The prize recognized her work last summer at the University of California, Merced. She is currently doing her honors undergraduate thesis in the UNC fluids lab.
McCombs in The Daily Tarheel
McCombs in The Daily Tarheel
Mark McCombs, an exhibiting artist and professor in the Department of Mathematics, combines math, fractals and origami to create unique paper sculptures and 2D images. McCombs is restructuring the first-year seminar he teaches to reflect what he learned while exhibiting his art in Stockholm, Sweden last summer.
Staff writer Mary Mac Porter talked to McCombs about the similarities between literature and mathematics and how he’s combining numbers and art in unique ways to attract math-adverse students to the subject.
DTH: How would you describe the first-year seminar that you’re restructuring and the art you’re creating in the process?
MM: The art projects grew out of the first-year seminar I was asked to teach, I think, maybe 10 years ago now. The first few semesters I taught it, I knew how to talk about, math, topics, but I didn’t create art because I felt like I’m one of those people that doesn’t have any art in me. I appreciate art and enjoy it and everything, but I was always intimidated by trying to make my own art.
Then one semester, after a couple years, the first day of class… a student came up and asked, ‘Are we going to do origami?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how to do that.’ He said, ‘I really like origami,’ and I said, ‘Tell you what, how about if you teach the class for two class meetings?’ So, he did. I really liked what he showed us how to do.
Then in 2015, my younger brother – who was an amazing guitarist – died unexpectedly from a heart attack. I brought home all his music, so I could archive it for his son who also plays guitar. So, as I’m transferring all this music, I’ve got the headphones on, and I’m folding paper, and then all of the sudden, the origami started coming out of me. I feel like in some ways it’s a gift to me from my brother.
What this discovery has inspired me to do is redesign my first-year seminar, so that it’s now focused on making origami and making fractal tessellations.
DTH: How does your artwork challenge preconceived notions about math?
MM: I’ve been teaching here for thirty years, and I’ve been teaching this math art class for around ten. But for thirty years, whenever someone asks what I do, and I tell them I teach math, they kind of back away from me or they’ll say, ‘I hate math. I’m not good at it.’
So part of what I hope to do in this particular class – because it’s not the traditional solve the equations, draw the graphs, do the calculus kind of thing – is maybe help persuade people who are coming in intimidated that they don’t have to be intimidated. I’m not trying to force them to become a math major or something like that.
My hope for the students in this first-year seminar is that when the semester ends, they’re not so quick to say, ‘I can’t think mathematically.’ I think another thing that has been an unexpected moment of insight for me is, I guess, my version of that is when someone would say, ‘Hey, I make art,’ and I would go, ‘Well, I can’t do that.’ Now I don’t feel as intimidated.
I guess if you find the medium you connect with, we can all express ourselves. And that’s what art really is, and I think that’s what math is too: you try to express how you understand the world through relationships of objects and ideas.
DTH: What is your favorite part of all of the work you do here at UNC?
MM: It’s always gratifying to me when, at the end of the semester, I get my course reviews back, and a student writes, ‘I never thought I’d say this, but my favorite class was my math class this semester.’ That’s not because of me – I mean, I was part of it – but when that happens for that student, it’s what my younger brother would always describe as moments of grace. In his music, he saw moments of grace that happened because of experiencing harmony — whether it’s musical harmony or harmony with a person or whatever.
DTH: Do you have anything else you’d like to add about your work in math, at UNC or in art?
MM: I did undergrad and grad here. I was an English major through my junior year. I took math all along because I liked it, but I wanted to write. Then when I went home over Christmas my junior year, I started to panic because if I graduate with a degree in English, I thought, ‘I’m going to end up being a teacher.’ It’s not that I thought that was a bad job. I just never imagined I could do that.
So I switched my major to math, and some practical joker somewhere said, ‘Okay, well guess what? You’re going to be a teacher.’ But that’s another moment of grace for me.
When I tell people that I was an English major before I switched to math, lots of times their response is ‘Wow! That’s a big change.’ For me, it doesn’t feel like a big switch because the parts of me that allow me to respond to literature are the parts of me that allow me to respond to the beauty of the way mathematical objects and ideas relate together.
Story by Mary Mac Porter, The Daily Tar Heel
Mastering the Art of Math
Mastering the Art of Math
When you take a look at Mark McCombs’ artwork, be sure to consider the mathematical equations behind them. The swirling pieces of paper and repeating designs in this mathematics teaching professor’s art is a study in mathematical symmetry. Math and art may appear to be at different ends of the educational spectrum, but to McCombs and his students, they couldn’t be more connected.
“I want to try to help people believe that math isn’t just numbers. Math is a way of interacting with your environment,” McCombs said.
McCombs works mainly in modular origami, which consists of smaller paper shapes that can be combined to create one complete sculpture. He also uses the Ultra Fractal software application to produce fractal images, geometric shapes that contain infinitely many copies of themselves no matter how many times you zoom in.
Sculpture in Sweden
McCombs’ art is spread all over the state and the world. Last July, two of McCombs’ pieces, a sculpture and a fractal print, were presented at the Bridges Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The sculpture was purchased by a curator at the Swedish Museum of Science and Technology. McCombs was also a featured artist at the Liquidambar Gallery in Pittsboro from June 2 to July 28. You can view his art at his website
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However, it was because of McCombs’ younger brother, Doug McCombs, that he was able to find the courage to submit his pieces to these galleries. In 2015, McCombs’ brother passed away from an unexpected heart attack. It was through his brother’s passion that McCombs said he began to understand what it meant to create art.
“He was just an amazing guitarist. And he inspired me in so many ways, but one of the ways that he inspired me is in my teaching. It’s just such a joy for me to share him with my students,” McCombs said.
“Doug always told me that tone is what allows us to experience grace through harmony. And that’s what I feel like I started to experience as I’m making the sculpture and fractal images. I really believe that Doug is part of it, too. It’s a gift to me from him.”
Perspectives on Math and Art
For the past ten years, McCombs has taught the first-year seminar Math, Art and the Human Experience, designed to give students different perspectives on what math and art can be.
This interdisciplinary outlook, McCombs said, is essential to create an approachable and humanities-focused curriculum for math. He has always thought this way; he received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in math at Carolina, but he also minored in English.
In the seminar, students look at different artists and evaluate their work based on its different planes of symmetry, angles and perspective. Students also design origami and fractal art using the Adobe Suite and the BeAM Makerspace.
Last spring, McCombs submitted a redesigned proposal for the seminar. For the first time this fall, the course will be completely focused on origami and fractals. Before 2016, McCombs himself hadn’t created art, but he said he’s ready to expand the course even more.
“I’m most gratified by the times at the end of the semester when I get my course reviews back and someone will have written, ‘I never thought I’d ever say, my favorite class was my math class.’”
Story by Kyra Miles, University Gazette
Mucha and Hinton Gilliam Fellowship
Mucha and Hinton Gilliam Fellowship
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded grants to 44 doctoral adviser-student pairs to improve faculty mentoring skills, support new scientific leaders, and foster diversity and inclusion in science.
A good scientific mentor can help students navigate different career paths and plug them into new networks. A mentor can be a sounding board and an advocate – and they can also make the experience of being a scientist more fun. Each fellow submitted a career statement describing how their personal experiences and training inform their science, and how they plan to make scientific culture more inclusive.
David Asai, HHMI’s Senior Director for science education, says the fellows all show promise as scientists. “The Gilliam program is aimed at people who will become leaders in science,” he says. “We’re trying to change the face of university faculty, so students see leaders of all different backgrounds.”
Peter Mucha and Andrew Hinton were selected for the Gilliam Fellowship. Along with a $50,000 annual award for up to three years for each adviser-student pair, advisers will participate in a year of mentor training focused on cultural awareness. Over the past four years, more than 130 advisers have taken part; activities include online training and two in-person workshops at HHMI headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Congratulations Peter and Andrew!
Metcalfe Award of Excellence
Metcalfe Award of Excellence
Professor Jason Metcalfe has received the 2019 Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring.
With this annual award, The Graduate School recognizes a faculty member who, “encourages students to establish their own record of scholarly activity or performance, provides a supportive environment that facilitates the development of best performance and talents from individual graduate students, and achieves a successful record of graduate degree completion among the students they have advised.”
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Graduate School Dean Steve Matson presented the award to Metcalfe at the University’s May 11 Doctoral Hooding Ceremony.
“Mentoring is an act of patience and support – both of which Dr. Metcalfe has demonstrated in multiple ways,” Matson said, in presenting the award.
The nomination letters highlighted numerous examples of Metcalfe’s expertise and “steadfast encouragement” of the students he advises, including, as one letter said, his “uncanny ability to illuminate difficult ideas and help students develop the tools to answer their own questions, rather than just providing a quick answer.”
Metcalfe joined UNC-Chapel Hill in 2007 as an assistant professor, was appointed to associate professor in 2012 and was appointed to professor in 2017. At Carolina, he has advised five doctoral students, two master’s degree students and five undergraduate students.
In 2018, he received the University of North Carolina Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. Metcalfe also received the mathematics department’s inaugural Sue Goodman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education in 2017.
Jason “embodies the best of academic advising – providing the expertise to conduct important research, the support and mentorship needed to succeed in graduate school, and the independence needed to move forward in an academic career,” wrote one nominator.
Metcalfe said that he had been remarkably fortunate to have caring and dedicated mentors at every point of his career and was humbled by the award.
“It is difficult to imagine that I am living up to the standards that these role models have set. It has been an honor and a joy to work with the students at UNC. Their achievements are due to their scholarly courage, dedication, and talent, and I have been a lucky witness to their growth as mathematicians.”
Morgan wins Boka Hadzija Award
Morgan wins Boka Hadzija Award
Katrina Morgan, a doctoral student in mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has received the 2019 Boka W. Hadzija Award for Distinguished University Service.
The annual award recognizes one graduate or professional student for outstanding character, scholarship, leadership and service to UNC-Chapel Hill. The Graduate School presented the award during the 21st Annual Graduate Student Recognition Celebration, held April 4. Morgan and other students were recognized for their outstanding leadership at the Chancellor’s Awards Ceremony on April 16, 2019.
In announcing Morgan’s award, Graduate School Dean Steve Matson commended her for providing “a tremendous amount of outreach to encourage girls’ interest in STEM fields.” One of these initiatives is Girls Talk Math, a two-week summer day camp for high school girls. Morgan and Francesca Bernardi, a recent doctoral alumna, co-founded the annual camp in 2016, and it has now expanded to the University of Maryland.
In July 2017, Girls Talk Math was honored with the Association for Women in Mathematics’ first Student Chapter Award for Community Outreach. Morgan and Bernardi received the 2018 University Award for the Advancement of Women for their work.
Additionally, Morgan frequently volunteers at outreach events such as the UNC Science Expo, the InspiHER Student Club at East Chapel Hill High School and conferences for undergraduate women in mathematics. She has served as president of the UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate Mathematics Association and is currently president of the campus student chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
The nomination letter provided examples of her excellence in service to UNC-Chapel Hill and beyond, in research and in teaching. Morgan holds both a Dissertation Completion Fellowship within The Graduate School and a Thomas S. Kenan III Graduate Fellowship within the College of Arts and Sciences.
“She is excelling in all aspects of academic life, including independently procuring funding for many of these activities. It has been a privilege to work with her,” Katrina’s nominator wrote.
Jason Metcalfe, a professor of mathematics, is Morgan’s doctoral adviser.
Boka W. Hadzija was an award-winning professor in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy; she established the award in 2000 in honor of her students. Hadzija, who died in 2013, is remembered by students and faculty for her strong mentorship, her generous support of students and her outstanding leadership.
Students Earn NSF Fellowships
Students Earn NSF Fellowships
We are excited to announce that three students in the Department of Mathematics have earned prestigious National Science Foundation funded Graduate Research Fellowships. We congratulate second year graduate student Samantha Moore, first year graduate student Maddie Brown, and undergraduate Keshav Patel on this remarkable achievement.
The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost of education allowance of $12,000 to the institution.
Strayer and Morgan FPG Honor Society
Strayer and Morgan FPG Honor Society
Department of Mathematics graduate students Katrina Morgan and Michael Strayer have been inducted into the Frank Porter Graham Graduate and Professional Student Honor Society.
This honor recognizes outstanding service to the university and to the community. Katrina and Michael are the first inductees from the Department of Mathematics since 1994. Both have served as officers of the Graduate Student Association for Mathematics, for the local chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics, AWM, and for the local Graduate Student Chapter for the American Mathematical Society, AMS.
Both have been mentors through the AWM chapter and through the new Directed Reading Program, which pairs interested undergraduate and graduate students for intensive one on one study. Moreover, Katrina’s work as a co-founder and co-director of the Girls Talk Math, summer program and Michael’s work as the founder and first president of the Graduate Student Chapter of the AMS, which first brought the TAGMAC Conference to UNC, have been particularly influential.
We are very proud of Katrina and Michael’s achievements. Congratulations both!
Cardiac Computation
Cardiac Computation
In his youth, Boyce Griffith was writing computer programs before he could drive a car. Now a UNC mathematician, he creates computational models of the human heart to improve the prediction and treatment of cardiac diseases.
If there’s an asteroid coming toward Earth, how early do you have to start pushing on it to deflect it? At one point in time, this question consumed Boyce Griffith. To find the answer, he wrote a computer program to simulate the scenario, conducting a handful of numerical experiments in the process.
“It was a pretty simple thing, two- or three-body particle dynamics,” Griffith says of the physics calculations he performed. Most adults would probably disagree about the simplicity of such calculations – and when Griffith wrote the code, he was just a middle schooler trying to finish his science fair project.
“I kind of grew up doing that sort of thing,” he says. “I don’t know when or why I got interested in simulation, but I’ve been intrinsically interested in it for a really long time.”
Because his passion for computer modeling seems innate, it’s no surprise that Griffith pursued research. He grew up in the science-focused community of Oak Ridge, Tennessee – a town built around a nuclear laboratory developed during the Manhattan Project. Post-World War II, Oak Ridge National Laboratory was converted to a multiprogram research facility and is the largest science and energy laboratory in the U.S. Department of Energy system. Griffith’s father was an engineer at the lab, and many of his friends’ parents were scientists or engineers there.
“My dad was an early adopter of personal computers in the ’80s, so I grew up with these non-user-friendly computers as things that I could play with,” Griffith explains. “Just the act of getting them to play computer games sometimes required reworking the operating system, so there was a lot you had to do to make things work.”
Years later, Boyce Griffith still works with computers. But instead of simulating asteroid deflection or programming games, he’s trying to understand the fluid mechanics of the human heart.
An associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at UNC, Griffith runs the Cardiovascular Modeling and Simulation Lab. He and his team use mathematical computation to research and develop beating heart simulations, modeling the interactions of the heart’s fluid movement, physical structure, and electrical system. Long-term goals are to improve both the prediction and treatment of heart conditions and the design of cardiac medical devices.
The Heart Of The Issue
More than 91 million people in the United States live with some form of cardiovascular disease, which claims more lives than all forms of cancer and chronic lower respiratory disease combined. Congestive heart disease, stroke, and heart valve failure are only a few of the many ailments contributing to the number-one cause of death worldwide.
While imaging techniques such as MRI have laid the groundwork for understanding cardiovascular mechanics, they can be expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, they often don’t provide adequate detail about the heart’s dynamic architecture, electricity, and fluid forces.
Cardiac electrophysiology, or the movement of electricity through the heart, is key to understanding heart function. Heartbeats are triggered by regular electrical impulses that spread through the cardiac walls, causing the contraction of each chamber in succession. Cardiac fluid dynamics, the pressures and movement of blood in the heart, can vary greatly among patients.
“You’ve got complex electrical dynamics, you’ve got structural motions and complicated fluid flow,” Griffith explains. “There’s a lot of components that all talk to each other.”
The interaction between these components needs to be considered when designing prosthetics and pinpointing treatment options for certain heart conditions.
“Understanding these forces is not just an image analysis project,” Griffith says. “It fundamentally requires mathematical modeling for physiological aspects that you can’t directly image, but still need to account for.”
Modeling Mechanics
Creating models to account for fluid structure interactions wasn’t part of Griffith’s original plan. As an undergraduate student at Rice University, he became interested in heart models while working on a cardiac electrophysiology project with his undergraduate advisor, Steve Cox. He was hooked and went to graduate school at New York University, specifically, to work with Charlie Peskin – a pioneer in heart modeling – with the intent of modeling the coupling between the heart’s electrical system and its mechanics.
But there was a catch. At that time, the existing modelling software included fluid and structural dynamics — but not electrophysiology. Griffith ended up rewriting this software in order to make it flexible enough to integrate the electrical models required for his research.
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“At some point, it was clear that it needed to be done, so I did it – and I’m still doing it!” Griffith admits. “It wound up being a bigger project than I anticipated.”
But how does one go about creating software to simulate these complicated processes?
Much of the mathematics behind Griffith’s work involves developing approximate solutions to complex equations. He and his team conduct laboratory experiments to calculate fluid force distributions. With this information, they can construct and tweak computer simulations.
For example, they are currently trying to model artificial heart valve functionality. Within these prosthetics, leaflets open and close to control blood flow, just like valves in a human heart. Using a technique called particle image velocimetry, they can image fluid movement through the leaflets with the help of a tabletop heart model called a pulse duplicator.
During these experiments, particles suspended in fluid are pushed through an artificial valve within a chamber of the pulse duplicator. As this happens, the particles in the chamber are illuminated by a rapidly pulsing laser beam, and their movement is tracked by a camera that takes a photo for each laser flash.
The resulting snapshots allow Griffith’s team to reconstruct the fluid’s motion through the valve and calculate the velocity of that fluid by examining the displacement of the particles between images. This analysis helps validate computer-generated models of the same process.
Getting Back On Beat
Another project Griffith and his team are working on is cardiac modeling for assessing the risk of clot development in the bloodstream, specifically focusing on clot formation due to atrial fibrillation. This heart condition, characterized by desynchronized beating between the left and right atrial chambers, is the most commonly diagnosed form of arrhythmia in the United States.
In atrial fibrillation, the electrical wave triggering a heartbeat is fragmented and chaotic, often reentering the cardiac tissue instead of being extinguished. The heart beats irregularly and often much faster than normal, greatly reducing blood flow. With this reduction comes the risk of blood coagulation and clotting, which can lead to stroke. Many patients with atrial fibrillation are prescribed anticoagulants, but these aren’t safe and effective for all cases. To determine whether patients should receive them, relatively simple metrics are used to assess clotting risk, and most patients are placed at intermediate risk.
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“You might find out blood pressure, age, or whether the patient has diabetes. And those kinds of measurements might be correlated to the risk of a patient developing a blood clot, but from those measurements you’re not really understanding what the mechanism is. You just know that it’s indicative that something could happen,” Griffith says.
To improve these metrics, Griffith works with cardiologists and researchers from UNC, Duke, and the University of Utah to develop computer models that simulate atrial fibrillation and blood clotting.
Co-investigator John Vavalle, an interventional cardiologist at UNC, hopes models from this project will help identify which patients might benefit more from a procedure called left atrial appendage occlusion, rather than from taking anticoagulants. This appendage is a thumb-like tissue pocket that extends from the left atrium.
“We know that in most people who have strokes due to atrial fibrillation, the clot originates from the left atrial appendage,” Vavalle says. “If you can plug it, you can trap the clot in the appendage and prevent it from making its way to the brain.”
For The Love Of Math
Both Griffith and Vavalle believe that mathematical models can greatly improve current healthcare and the lives of those affected by heart disease.
“I think they’ll ultimately make us better at what we do and improve outcomes for our patients,” Vavalle says. “Imagine the benefits of really understanding, at a level that we never have before, the flow states through the heart and what devices might be effective for certain patients.”
Griffith shares these ideals, emphasizing that computer models are needed most in the space where components of physiological systems such as the heart are well understood individually, but difficult to understand when interacting as a whole. Characterizing the interaction of individual components within a model will allow scientists to test hypotheses for how they function in their real biological setting.
But his ambitions to understand the inner workings of the heart are rooted in the same interest that had him simulating asteroid impact as a teenager – he simply loves math.
“I want to make models because the dynamics are cool,” Griffith says. “I like the mathematical parts. There are these fascinating patterns and difficult numerical analysis problems to solve. We need to solve them in order to make the models and have the impact we desire.”
Boyce Griffith is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and adjunct faculty in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. He is also adjunct faculty in UNC and NC State’s Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering.
He is a member of the McAllister Heart Institute and the Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics and is affiliated with the Computational Medicine Program at the UNC School of Medicine.
John Vavalle is an interventional cardiologist and professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology within the UNC School of Medicine. He is the medical director of the UNC Structural Heart Disease Program and leads the UNC Heart Valve Clinic.
Story by Liah McPherson, Endeavor Magazine, April 4th, 2019
Katie Newhall chosen by APS
Katie Newhall chosen by APS
Katie Newhall, Assistant Professor with the Department of Mathematics, has been chosen among the 143 Outstanding Referees of the Physical Review journals!
The American Physical Society, APS, has selected Outstanding Referees for 2019 that have demonstrated exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in the Physical Review journals. A full list of the Outstanding Referees is available online at here.
Instituted in 2008, the Outstanding Referee program annually recognizes approximately 150 of the currently active referees for their invaluable work. Comparable to Fellowship in the APS and other organizations, this is a lifetime award. The selection this year was made from 30 years of records on over 71,000 referees who have been called upon to review manuscripts, including more then 40,000 that were submitted in 2018.
The basis for the Outstanding Referees selection takes into account the quality, number and timeliness of a referee’s reports, without regard for membership in the APS, country of origin, or field of research. Individuals with current or very recent direct connections to the journals, such as editors and editorial board members, were excluded.
Congratulations, Katie!