Research Assistant Professor Abigail Crocker received a large grant to establish a National Center on Restorative Justice (a Leahy championed initiative). This Center is a partnership between the Vermont Law School (host institution), University of San Diego, and UVM (research core of the National Center). The objective of the Center is to improve criminal justice practice and policy in the US, through education and training, and research on social disparities. Prof. Crocker is the PI on the UVM subawards (a colleague in UVM College of Arts and Sciences is co-PI). The UVM portion of this grant is over 3 million dollars (over a five-year period).
Professor Jeff Buzas, Director of Statistics, received a subaward for an NIH (National Institutes of Health) R01 grant with University of South Carolina. This grant is titled “Hospital Quality, Medicaid Expansion and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Maternal Mortality and Morbidity.” Professor Buzas will be working with PhD student Lucy Greenberg on this project.
The UVM-Google "Open Source Complex Ecosystems And Networks (OCEAN)" project, funded by a $1M gift from Google Open Source in 2020 with Associate Professor of Mathematics Jim Bagrow and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Laurent Hébert-Dufresne as PIs, has led to a funded DARPA project called LAGOON (Leveraging AI to Guard Online Open Source). LAGOON is led overall by David Darais at Galois, while the UVM team is led by Nick Cheney in Computer Science. The OCEAN PIs (Jim Bagrow and Laurent Hébert-Dufresne) serve as key personnel. The UVM subcontract is $166k for phase 1 (June-September 2021), and $174k for phase 2 (if approved, Sep. 2021 – Mar. 2022).
Prof. Jim Bagrow also published a reader response in Nature titled “how well do machines summarize our work?”, Nature 590, 36 (2021).
Professor Jun Yu wrote a collaborative paper with Associate Professor Michael Tomas III of UVM Grossman School of Business, which was published in the MDPI journal “Mathematics” (open access journal with Impact Factor 2.258). The paper is titled “An Asymptotic Solution for Call Options on Zero-Coupon Bonds“. This is Prof. Yu’s first paper in the new research direction of financial mathematics. In this work, Prof. Yu and his collaborator studied stochastic processes for the option price on bonds and derived a PDE model that is an extension of the celebrated Black and Scholes model.
Assistant Professor Jean-Gabriel Young coauthored the following two papers in Physical Review Letters and Nature Communications (both are very prestigious journals): “Inference, model selection and the combinatorics of growing trees”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 038301 (2021). “Reconstruction of plant–pollinator networks from observational data”, Nature Commun. 12, 3911 (2021).
Senior Lecturer Dan Hathaway published three papers on logic, one of them being “Perfect Tree Forcings for Singular Cardinals” with N. Dobrinen and K. Prikry, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 171, 102827 (2020). This is impressive, especially because research is not part of Dr. Hathaway’s workload.
Professor Chris Danforth (PI), together with four other UVM co-PIs (H. Garavan, J. Li, J.P. O'Neil-Dunne, M.T. Niles), was awarded a large NSF MRI (Major Research Instrumentation) two-year grant for a project titled “Acquisition of a Massive Database to Accelerate Data Science Discovery”. The NSF portion of the grant is $725,016, and UVM cost share is $310,721.
Prof. Danforth’s PhD student Thayer Alshaabi in Complex Systems and Data Science published the final chapter of his thesis in the journal “Science Advances”. The paper is titled “Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter”. Thayer is now a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Advanced Bioimaging Center, UC Berkeley, working with a Nobel Prize winning Chemist on machine learning for 3D image processing of cells.
Prof. Danforth’s Postdoc Mikaela Fudolig (co-supervised by Prof. Peter Dodds of Computer Science) was featured in the UVM Graduate College’s website for her work on Ousiometrics and Telegnomics, which are defined to be the study of the essence of meaning and remotely sensed knowledge, respectively.
Prof. Danforth’s StoryLab hosted Henry Wu for a gap year research project following his Essex High School graduation. The project brought together experts on activism from Northeastern University, and Philosopher Randall Harp from UVM to produce a manuscript now in review: "Say Their Names: Resurgence in the collective attention toward Black victims of fatal police violence following the death of George Floyd”. Henry is now a first-year undergraduate student at Harvard.
Assistant Professor Puck Rombach’s PhD student Hunter Rehm worked as an intern at NASA over the summer and is continuing in this role during the fall. His team uses graph theoretic techniques to determine a risk metric for a variety of medical conditions, to aid in making health-based decisions for astronauts.
Assistant Professor Spencer Backman received a Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant titled “Algebra, Geometry, and Combinatorics of Matroids”. The total budget of this grant is $42,000 over a five-year period. Significantly, $6,000 of this budget is discretionary funds for the Chair of our department to promote research atmosphere within the department!
Four math majors, Izzy Schmitt (above, left), Veronika Potter (above, center),Reese Green (above, right), and Maddie Burke (not pictured) were elected to Phi Beta Kappa! The Phi Beta Kappa Society is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences, and to induct the most outstanding students of arts and sciences at only select American colleges and universities.
Their award paper is titled “Which Contributions Count? Analysis of Attribution in Open Source”. The paper examines the various ways in which people are given credit for their work on Open Source Software, and identifies areas where existing methods of attribution could be improved. 
Sophie Gonet, who completed her PhD in May 2021 under the supervision of Professors Jonathan Sands and Richard Foote (with additional help from Professor Greg Warrington and Assistant Professor Spencer Backman), went on to join the Rutgers University's math faculty as an Assistant Teaching Professor. In her PhD thesis, Sophie obtained a significant result in algebraic graph theory.
Bo Yang, who completed his three-year postdoc in September 2021 under the supervision of Professor Jianke (Jackie) Yang, accepted an Associate Professor position in the Math Department of Ningbo University (China). This university has a strong applied math program, and several of its faculty members are nationally and internationally known. Bo obtained his PhD from East China Normal University in 2018. During his postdoc-ship at UVM, Bo obtained significant results on nonlinear wave patterns in physical PDE models. He has published 8 papers in leading applied math journals, with a couple more papers under preparation.
Tyson Pond, who completed a Masters of Science in Math with Associate Professor Jim Bagrow in 2020, started a new job as a data analyst with MediaAlpha in Los Angeles.
Sam Schiavone 
Shauna (Simeone) Revay 
Troy Norman