The African Diaspora Joint Mathematics Workshop (ADJOINT) will take place at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA from June 21 to July 2, 2021. ADJOINT is a two-week summer activity designed for researchers with a Ph.D. degree in the mathematical and statistical sciences who are interested in conducting research in a collegial environment. The main objective of ADJOINT is to provide opportunities for in-person research collaboration to U.S. mathematical and statistical scientists, especially those from the African Diaspora, who will work in small groups with research leaders on various research projects. Through this effort, MSRI aims to establish and promote research communities that will foster and strengthen research productivity and career development among its participants. The ADJOINT workshops are designed to catalyze research collaborations, provide support for conferences to increase the visibility of the researchers, and to develop a sense of community among the mathematical and statistical scientists who attend. This program will enhance the mathematical and statistical sciences and its community by positively affecting the research and careers of African-American mathematical and statistical scientists and supporting their efforts to achieve full access and engagement in the broader research community. During the workshop, each participant will:
Eligibility Applicants must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, possess a Ph.D. in the mathematical or statistical sciences, and be employed at a U.S. institution. Selection Process The guiding principle in selecting participants and establishing the groups is the creation of diverse teams whose members come from a variety of institutional types and career stages. The degree of potential positive impact on the careers of African-Americans in the mathematical and statistical sciences will be an important factor in the final decisions. Application Process The application deadline is February 1, 2021. Applicants must provide:
Due to funding restrictions, only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply. 2021 Research Leaders and Topics Danny Krashen (Rutgers University) Understanding Galois extensions of fields is a central problem in algebra, with a number of open questions, accessible at a number of levels. At the core, Galois theory is an attempt to understand the arithmetic of fields, by studying the types of equations one can set up over a given field, and the structure and symmetries of their sets of solutions. (Click for full description) Nathan Broaddus (Ohio State University) Many important groups of interest in topology are duality groups. As such they have an associated group cohomological object which we call the “Steinberg Module” of the group. We will begin with an introduction to the braid group and discuss a number of elementary descriptions of its Steinberg Module. Our first research goal will be to unify as many of these disparate descriptions as possible. (Click for full description) Emma K. T. Benn (Mount Sinai University) Reducing and eliminating health disparities is of utmost concern for many public health and biomedical researchers and has been a stated goal for Healthy People 2000, 2010, and 2020. However, when it comes to racial disparities in health, researchers have done well at describing differences, but have often struggled to identify mutable targets for intervention. This problem exists for a host of reasons, including the complex contextual factors surrounding racial disparities, however, this may also stem from the way in which we operationalize race in research. For the proposed project, we will first explore the operationalization of race as a “cause” when examining racial disparities in health based on multidisciplinary discourse around this topic from statisticians informed by the potential outcomes framework, epidemiologists, clinical investigators, and others. (Click for full description) Julie Ivy (North Carolina State University) The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of sequential decision making under conditions of uncertainty, learning as the future evolves, and effectively using data to inform decision making. The pandemic further highlights the significant role that mathematical modeling can and should play in addressing complex human-centered problems. This research project will consider these types of problems from a systems modeling perspective. The focus of this project will be decision making under conditions of uncertainty with the goal of modeling complex interactions and quantitatively capturing the impact of different factors, objectives, system dynamics, intervention options and policies on outcomes with the goal of improving decision quality. (Click for full description) ADJOINT Program Directors
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