I think math is way more fun in a community. Below you can find out about community-efforts I’ve been involved in at various places I’ve been at.
While at Penn
Starting in 2023, I’ve helped to organize the MIT Talbot workshop. Additionally, I’m involved with various things in the math department:
- I organize the Directed Reading Program with Léo Ferreira Guilhoto (2023-current).
- I help coordinate the GeMs in Math, which is a social group supporting gender minorities in math in the UPenn math department.
- I volunteer with programs that provide incarcerated students access to college-accredited mathematics courses, such as Princeton University’s Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI) and Eastern University’s Prison Education Program (PEP).
- I organized the graduate geometry/topology seminar in 2022-2023 with Andres Mejia.
- I organized the grad student pizza seminar in 2021-2022 with Krishan Canzius.
I worked with Mona Merling on a couple of summer projects, supported by the Netter Center’s Graduate Community-Engaged Research fellowship:
- Summer 2022: Together with Yumeng Ou and Marielle Ong, Mona and I thought about how to build infrastructure for math circles in West Philadelphia. You can read my reflection on this project. Starting in Fall 2023, math circles have become a reality at West Philadelphia High School (learn more in this OMNIA article).
- Summer 2021: Mona and I developed resources for her Academically-Based Community Service (ABCS) course Math 123, which you can read more about in this article in Penn Today. You can read my reflection on this project.
I’ve mentored the following directed reading program (DRP) projects:
- Fall 2023: Talia Becker Calazans, Combinatorial Topology
- Fall 2022 and Spring 2023: Elena Isasi Theus, Computational Algebraic Topology
- Spring 2022: Cianán Conefrey-Shinozaki, 2D Topological Quantum Field Theories
- Fall 2021: Michael Zeng, Simplicial Homotopy Theory
I also have a running page of fun outreach activities related to geometry/topology.
While at Reed
I co-organized STEMGeMs (Reed’s student group for gender minorities in STEM fields) and co-led the aerial acrobatics troupe. Other places I worked in college included:
- Special Collections and Archives, cataloguing materials and repairing books. I had this job both at the Reed Library and the Portland Art Museum.
- The costume shop in the Theater Department at Reed, sewing costumes for various productions.
- Echo Theater Company, teaching aerial silks to kids.
- Camp Stevens, helping coordinate the Farm and Garden program for summer camp.
I adopted a polyhedron, called the Xinegon, which you can see here. The Xinegon has 631 siblings, with f-vector (9, 17, 10). I like that she has some triangular faces, some quadrilateral faces, and some pentagonal faces.