Author: Veronica McClain

The School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences is happy to announce we are accepting applications for a new Masters in Data Science in Analytics.  This program is joint program between our School and the Department of Management.  The program is a 30 credit hour 100% online program.  For more information about the program and how to apply please visit: https://www.clemson.edu/science/departments/math-stat/academics/graduate/ms-dsa.html

Our School celebrated the achievements of our top undergraduate students at our annual Undergraduate Faculty Awards Ceremony on April 13. These are the incredible students we honored:

David Campbell: Faculty Freshman Award
Biraj Dahal: John Charles Harden Award
Killian Davis: Faculty Freshman Award
Katie Francis: Faculty Senior Award
Emi Graham: Faculty Freshman Award
Evan Haithcock: Faculty Sophomore Award
Jacob Honeycutt: Class of 1902- Samuel M. Martin Award
Mary Mell: Faculty Senior Award
Robert Melville: Faculty Senior Award
Laura Kate Reid: Faculty Sophomore Award
John Rowe: Faculty Junior Award
Kyle Seelman: John Charles Harden Award
Sam Smith: Faculty Freshman Award
William Sullivan: John Charles Harden Award
Carson Wood: Faculty Freshman Award
Sylvia Wu: Sue King Dunkle Award
Dora Yang: John Charles Harden Award

Associate Professor Chris McMahan and his coauthors were awarded “Best Paper in Biometrics by an IBS Member” for 2017 by the International Biometric Society and the “ASA 2018 Outstanding Statistical Application Award” by the American Statistical Association for their paper “Hierarchical group testing for multiple infections.” The paper is co-authored with Peijie Hou, Joshua Tebbs, and Christopher Bilder. From the paper abstract: “Tebbs, McMahan, and Bilder (2013, Biometrics) recently evaluated the performance of a two-stage hierarchical algorithm used to screen for chlamydia and gonorrhea as part of the Infertility Prevention Project in the United States. In this article, we generalize this work to accommodate a larger number of stages.”

Congratulations to Chris and his co-authors!

Cynthia Y. Young* joined the Clemson family this fall as the dean for the new College of Science**. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Young developed mathematical models governing atmospheric effects in laser communication channels. In 2001, she was selected by the Office of Naval Research for the Young Investigator Award and, in 2007, was selected as a fellow of the International Society of Optics and Photonics (SPIE).

During her 20-year career at the University of Central Florida, Young served as the vice provost for Faculty Excellence and UCF Global. She led university-wide initiatives to strengthen, recruit and retain exceptional and diverse faculty and internationalize the university. In 2007, Young co-founded UCF’s EXCEL program, which, in 10 years, has increased STEM majors’ graduation rates by 40 percent. Young served in several other leadership roles at UCF, including the NCAA faculty athletics representative, and associate dean for research in the College of Sciences.

Since arriving in August, Young has recruited key faculty and staff members that will not only reinforce and strengthen Clemson as an R1 research university, but will also advance ScienceForward***.

Casting her vision towards the future, Young has assembled a diverse team of university scholars, community partners, and alumni to craft ScienceForward. Aligned with ClemsonForward****, ScienceForward will act as a roadmap to guide our strategic priorities and hold us accountable to our aspirations. It will focus on academic, faculty and inclusive excellence, seeking high impact and transformational experiences.

“We have a unique opportunity as a new college to define our collective values, pillars of excellence, and areas of distinctive impact,” said Young. “This opportunity to build a world-class College of Science with our exceptional students, faculty and staff energizes and inspires us all. Together, our collective footprint – life, physical, and mathematical sciences – has the power to be both locally relevant and globally impactful when we harness our talents to improve lives.”

Young earned a Bachelor of Arts in education (secondary mathematics) from the University of North Carolina (1990), a Master of Science in mathematical science from the University of Central Florida (1993), a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (1997) and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Washington (1996).

— * weblink: https://www.clemson.edu/science/contact/index.html

** weblink: https://www.clemson.edu/science/index.html

*** weblink: https://www.clemson.edu/science/about/scienceforward.html

**** weblink: https://www.clemson.edu/forward/

Pye Aung is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences. His research interests are in commutative algebra and homological algebra, particularly homological dimensions of various complexes. He is working with Dr. Sean Sather-Wagstaff, and he is also teaching some undergraduate courses. Pye received his Ph.D. from North Dakota State University in 2015. Prior to visiting Clemson, he taught at the University of the Pacific in California and Grinnell College in Iowa.

Joe Bible is a new Assistant Professor in the Applied Statistics subfaculty. He earned his MS in Applied Statistics from Kennesaw State and his PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Louisville in 2015. After Louisville he completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. His research interests focus on methods for analyzing clustered longitudinal data. His collaborative work includes applications in the biomedical, social and material sciences.

Ben Jaye is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics.  His research interests are in geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and probability theory.  After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 2011, he worked at Kent State University — first as a postdoctoral scholar, and then as an assistant professor — before joining Clemson.

Hervé Kerivin, a former faculty member in our department, has returned for a year as a visiting associate professor.  Dr. Kerivin’s expertise is in operations research, particularly in the areas of network and integer programming.  His home institution is University Clermont Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand, France. In addition to continuing research collaborations with Dr. Margaret Wiecek, Dr. Kerivin is teaching (MATH 8140 this Fall and MATH 8120 in Spring 2018) and is also working with Dr. Taufiquar Khan and other university officials to explore possible exchange programs between our universities.

Jennifer Newton is returning to the Math Sciences Department after taking 5 years off after the birth of her youngest child in 2012. She is a life-long resident of South Carolina and currently resides in the Piedmont/Powdersville community with her husband, Matt, of 26 years and their three children, Tyler (22), Savannah (18), and Addie (5). In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, gardening, learning about herbs and herbal remedies, reading, sewing, and engaging in various craft and DIY projects. Jennifer earned her MS in Mathematical Sciences from Clemson University in 1993 with an emphasis in Operations Research. Her past teaching experience includes nine years as a math instructor at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC, three years as a high school mathematics teacher at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Greenville, SC, and seven years teaching the business calculus sequence here at Clemson. In addition, Jennifer spent several semesters coordinating Math 2070.

Stephen Peele is a Lecturer in the department. Stephen earned his MS in Mathematical Sciences from Clemson in May 2017 under Dr. Jim Peterson. He has had an interest in teaching undergraduates for some time now and is grateful for the opportunity to continue to pursue this interest at Clemson. Outside of mathematics, Stephen enjoys growing plants and vegetables, particularly superhot peppers. He lives in Central with his wife, Briana, who is also a Clemson graduate and employee. They have two cats, Socks and Oyster, and two Holland Lop rabbits, Morris and Juniper.

Malcolm Rupert joins us as a postdoc on the Coding Theory, Cryptography, and Number Theory RTG grant. He recently graduated from the University of Idaho where he studied a theta lift construction of Siegel paramodular forms, under the advisement of Jennifer Johnson-Leung and Brooks Roberts. As an educator, Malcolm is interested in how active learning methods can improve the outcomes in his courses. On a more personal note, this native of Seattle enjoys coffee, hiking, and craft beer, preferably in that order.

Chang-An Zhao is a Visiting Scholar in the Mathematical Sciences Department from May 2017 to June 2018. He is an associate professor in the School of Mathematics at Sun Yat-sen University in China. His research interests are applied algebra and coding theory. He is working with Shuhong Gao in the field of coding theory.

On September 17, 2017, it was announced that the State of South Carolina was awarded an NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 grant, entitled MADE in SC, short for Materials Assembly and Design Excellence in South Carolina. Quoting from the MADE in SC website: ‘The vision of the [MADE in SC] initiative is to discover and establish new and sustainable approaches for the design and assembly of hierarchical materials at multiple relevant length scales that serve South Carolina’s STEM research, education and workforce needs and invigorate economic development.’ Resources from the grant will support recruitment of 17 new faculty across 5 institutions (including one hire for math sciences), postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, research facilities, and outreach to K-12 schools and the private sector. One of the biggest impacts of this grant will be the leverage it provides for further funding.

Chris Cox is a co-leader of the multiscale Modeling and Computation Core.

Professors Hyesuk Lee and Margaret Wiecek are contributing faculty members for the Stimuli-Responsive Polymeric Materials Thrust.

To read more about this grant, follow the link at

http://mailchi.mp/581e6836853b/sc-epscoridea-big-news-for-south-carolina?e=3497522a88

Senior Lecturer Mark Cawood passed the Models of Financial Economics Actuarial Exam on July 6th. He has now passed three actuarial exams. Congratulations, Mark!

Billy Bridges, Andrew Brown, Robert Lund, Chris McMahan, and Jim Peterson are some of the faculty members in Mathematical Sciences with recent grant funding awards. These projects represent cutting edge research in Analysis and Statistics, broadly construed. You can read more about these projects below.

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Research Snapshots

Billy Bridges, Robert Lund, and Chris McMahan’s project “Modeling rice production and resistance to climate change in Indonesia” was funded by Biorealm for $21K. This project investigates Oryza sativa or Asian rice, which is a staple food worldwide. To ensure food security for a growing population, there is a dire need to identify high-yielding rice plant varieties that are resistant to climate change. Developing new high-yielding varieties that are resistant to climate change is also important. For example, the population of Indonesia, with an annual growth rate of 1.21%, is estimated to reach 337 million in 2050. With an annual consumption rate of approximately 139kg of rice per capita per year, Indonesian production must increase to 47 million tons by 2050 to meet demand. Climate change, through rising temperatures, drought, and more frequent and/or prolonged flood events, complicates this task; it is estimated that rice yields will decline by approximately 7% for every degree Celsius increase in temperature. The goal of this proposal is to statistically analyze a rice yield database being compiled by the Bioinformatics and Data Science Research Center (BDSRC) at Bina Nusantara University (Jakarta, Indonesia). The analysis seeks to identify key factors (e.g., environmental, genetic, ancestral, climatic, etc.) for rice yield.

Andrew Brown’s project “Simulation-Based Design of Polymer Nanocomposites for Structural Applications” with Sez Atamturktur (Civil Engineering) and Christopher Kitchens (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for $428K. Engineers and scientists routinely study systems driven by extremely complex processes that are only partially understood, but conducting physical experiments to better glean their behavior is prohibitively resource intensive. As such, computer models are frequently used to predict the behavior of a system under a variety of conditions. In addition to conditions that are known and/or controllable in reality, most computer models take as inputs parameter values corresponding to physical constants or system characteristics. These parameter values must be specified in the code, despite their true values being unknown. Model calibration is the process of tuning such parameters to get computer models to agree with reality while quantifying the associated uncertainty. Calibrating a computer model is similar to engineering design in that the aim is to find values of certain parameters (the design parameters) so that the system outcomes will most closely agree with the target data (the performance criteria). This similarity is the crux of this project. The aim of this research is to use model calibration principles to create a new paradigm for engineering material design and manufacturing, with particular application to designing low-cost, high-performance wind turbine blades.

Traditional engineering design considers materials one at a time from a database of existing materials and choosing construction parameters to satisfy performance criteria. In this sense, the final design is constrained by the particular material used in construction. On the other hand, material design uses microscale composition and processing options to create entirely new materials that achieve a specific property enhancement, but the end use of the material might be entirely neglected. To address both of these current limitations, the investigators are expressing the design problem as a model calibration problem to concurrently incorporate both macroscopic design criteria as well as constraints imposed on the possible designs by material properties.

Drawing on their previous work involving state-dependent computer model calibration (e.g., Brown and Atamturktur, 2018, Statistica Sinica), the investigators are taking a fully Bayesian approach to estimating the microscale material characteristics via a macroscale finite element computer model that predicts the performance. In addition to allowing direct incorporation of subject matter expert knowledge, this approach facilitates quantification of all sources of uncertainty. These sources include measurement error, the computer model itself (i.e., discrepancy between the computer and reality due to missing physics), using a computationally cheap Gaussian process emulator in place of the computationally expensive finite element model, and the uncertainty about the estimated parameters themselves. By explicitly incorporating the uncertainty into design decisions, the final design will be more robust to model misspecification and inexact performance predictions. Ongoing research questions that they are addressing include the most appropriate way to express the design criteria while accounting for cost, the effect of model discrepancy on the design, and extending statistical calibration methodology to accommodate simultaneous calibration of discrete and continuous parameters whose allowable values are interdependent.

Robert Lund and Chris McMahan have had four projects funded by the Companion Animal Parasite Council: “2017-2018 Parasite Forecasting Agreement” for $34K, “2016-2017 Parasite Forecasting” for $71K, “Forecasting various canine vector-borne diseases within the conterminous United States” for $78K, and “CAPC 2015 Clemson University parasite forecasting” for $52K. These projects involve developing and vetting spatiotemporal statistical techniques that can be used to model and forecast future trends in several vector borne canine diseases; e.g., erlichiosis, anaplasmosis, Lyme disease, and heartworm. To accomplish these goals, millions of diagnostic test results, conducted throughout the conterminous United States on the county level, have been compiled, along with putative risk factor data. This information is being used to build statistical models which forecast future trends in disease prevalence. Current work, also seeks to extend these models to use canine disease spread as a sentinel for the potential risk to humans in the case of Lyme disease.

Chris McMahan’s project “Group testing for infectious disease detection: multiplex assays and back-end screening” with Joshua Tebbs (University of South Carolina) and Christopher Bilder (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for $192K. This project studies testing individuals for infectious diseases, which is important for disease surveillance and for ensuring the safety of blood donations. When faced with questions on how to test as many individuals as possible and still operate within budget limits, public health officials are increasingly turning toward the use of group testing (pooled testing). In these applications, individual specimens (such as blood or urine) are combined to form a single pooled specimen for testing. Individuals within negative testing pools are declared negative. Individuals within positive testing pools are retested in some predetermined algorithmic manner to determine which individuals are positive and which individuals are negative. For low disease prevalence settings, this innovative testing process leads to fewer overall tests, which subsequently lowers costs, when compared to testing specimens individually. Previous research in group testing has focused largely on testing for infections, such as HIV and chlamydia, one at a time. However, motivated by the development of new technology, disease testing practices are moving towards the use of multiplex assays that detect multiple infections at once. This research proposal presents the first comprehensive extensions of group testing to a multiplex assay setting. The first goal is to develop new group testing strategies that allow for multiplex assays to be used in sexually transmitted disease testing and blood donation screening applications. This will allow laboratories to obtain the maximum possible cost savings through proper applications of group testing. The second goal is to develop new group testing strategies to increase the classification accuracy both with single and multiple infections in these same applications. This will be done by performing directed confirmatory testing after individuals are initially classified as positive or negative. An overarching theme of this research is to acknowledge individual risk factors by incorporating them into the group testing process. In terms of biostatistical innovation, this research involves developing new classification and Bayesian modeling procedures for correlated latent-variable data.

Jim Peterson recently received a 38 month grant from the Army Research Office to work on “Complex Models on Graph Based Topological Spaces” for $380K. The work supports some student activity at both the undergraduate and graduate level as well. The research uses graphs of computational nodes whose nodal and edge processing functions can be arbitrarily complex. The specific application domains are

1. autoimmune models building on work already completed on West Nile Virus infections. The nodes are immunosynapses and the edge processing functions are based on T cell – pMHC interactions mediated by families of cytokine/ chemokine signals. The immunosynapse computations are based on new models of affinity/ avidty that try to understand how weak bindings can give rise to self-damage.

2. consciousness models building on work already completed on cognitive models. Predatory wasp – prey interactions provide key insights into the construction of anesthesia models to help prevent iZombie states in operating theaters. An iZombie state is one where a patient is aware of the operation even though appearing to be anesthesized properly. Nodal and edge computations are based on approximations of neuron processing and ideas from homology and Betti decompositions of cytokine/ chemokine signals. In addition, models of cognitive dysfunction are a logical consequence on these studies as iZombie creation requires an alteration of a normal cognitive map. Hence, understanding how to assess iZombie states gives critical clues about other map changes.

3. search models through topological spaces determined by graphs whose node and edge calculations are based on pseudo fractal decompositions.

All three on these research thrusts are linked by viewing the consequences of computations as being shaped by the topology of the manifold determined by the graph and its input structure. Ideas from condensed matter physics that lead to an understanding of topological defects are an inspiration. This work has a heavy computational component also.

The Department of Mathematical Sciences and the Clemson University Actuarial Club (CUAC) hosted the Fourth Annual Actuarial/Financial Math Expo on Monday, September 25th. The Expo was originally a miniature career fair for students majoring in math sciences who want to be actuaries, but the Expo was expanded this year to include companies that hire math majors to do financial work. Representatives from twelve companies attended: Aetna, Aflac, Aon Hewitt, AXA, Blackstream, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Carmax, Colonial Life, The Lincoln Financial Group, Oliver Wyman, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Willis Towers Watson.

At the Expo, it was announced that The Lincoln Financial Group will make a contribution of $2500 to the CUAC to reimburse students who pass actuarial exams during the 2017–2018 academic year. This is a tangible way the Department of Mathematical Sciences can support students who want to pursue careers as actuaries.

Clemson University’s Student Chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) hosted a kickoff event on Thursday, Sept. 21. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members enjoyed fun, food, games and discussion of upcoming AWM activities. Read more about the kickoff event here.

Clemson’s AWM chapter was created in 2013 to encourage those, particularly women, pursuing education and careers in fields related to the mathematical sciences by mentoring at all stages of the mathematical career, and by promoting increased awareness of and interest in the mathematical sciences and the role of women in the mathematical sciences, through acts of service. Clemson’s Student Chapter of AWM is open to all.

If you have questions about Clemson’s AWM Student Chapter, feel free to contact the chapter’s co-advisors Lea Jenkins (lea@clemson.edu) and Gretchen Matthews (gmatthe@clemson.edu) or any of the chapter’s officers: Kara Stasikelis (stasike@g.clemson.edu), Kayla Javier (kjavier@g.clemson.edu), Amy Grady (agrady@g.clemson.edu), and Hannah McCall (hmccal2@g.clemson.edu).

Also, check out the chapter’s Facebook page for information on upcoming events!