Keith E. Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the department of mathematics, and former UMW student Jake Farinholt coauthored the article “Minimal generators for BCH codes” published in spring 2011 issue of The Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, an official publication of the national honorary mathematics society.
Mary Rigsby, professor of English, and Suzanne Sumner, professor of mathematics, gave an invited feature presentation at the Teaching Professor Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, held May 20-22, titled “BustingWalls and Overcoming Blahs: Knotty Problems and Speed Dating.” The Teaching Professor Conference is a premier international conference on teaching pedagogy at the college level, with 800 participants from 10 countries.
Rigsby and Sumner received this invitation because of their past participation in Teaching Professor conferences, and to share their
experiences as former directors of UMW’s Teaching Innovation Program. In addition, Sumner is currently on the advisory board for the Teaching Professor Conference and reviewed proposals for contributed sessions for the conference.
Kathryn Loesser-Casey, professor of biological sciences, and Debra Hydorn, professor of mathematics, gave the poster presentation “Putting BIO2010 Into Practice: A Course on the Research Process for STEM Majors” at the Association of American Colleges and Universities conference “Engaged STEM Learning: From Promising to Pervasive Practices” held in Miami in March. The poster presentation provided an opportunity for Hydorn and Loesser-Casey to share information about the UMW course, Biology 260 The Research Process, with faculty from across the STEM disciplines.
Keith E. Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, had the article “Spreads, Arcs, and Multiple Wavelength Codes” published in the journal Discrete Mathematics. In addition, his article “On the Number of K-Gons in Finite Projective Planes” was published in the Italian journal Note di Mathematica.
Debra L. Hydorn, professor of mathematics, gave an invited presentation on community service-learning in statistics at the eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in July. Her presentation, “Combining On- and Off-Campus Service-Learning in a Statistics Methods Course,” described how students in MATH 210 Statistical Methods provide statistical consulting for students enrolled in Biology Professor Kathy Loesser-Casey’s BIOL 385 Human Physiology. ICOTS is held every four years and is organized by the International Association for Statistical Education. According to the conference website, the main purpose of ICOTS is to “give statistics educators and professionals around the world the opportunity to exchange information, ideas and experiences, to present recent innovation and research in the field of statistics education, and to expand their range of collaborators.”
