Organizing Committee

Dr. Allan Donsig has been a member or co-chair of the organizing committee since the conference's inception. He is an Associate Professor in the department and has been involved in organizing several conferences and AMS special sessions, including the Department's 2001 Rowlee Lecture, given by Fields medalist Vaughn F. R. Jones, and a week-long Workshop at the Banff International Research Station. His research is in operator algebras and operator theory, where he has supervised a UNL undergraduate student in a UCARE (Undergraduate Creative Activities & Research Experiences) project.

Dr. Brian Harbourne was involved with the NCUWM for the first time last year. He is a Professor in the department whose research is in algebraic geometry and who has supervised two students to doctorates. He was on the organizing committee for the entire 14 year run of the NSF funded Mountain West conferences. He was principal investigator of a 2002 NSF grant to bring graduate students and early career researchers to an international conference in Sicily, Italy (which is where the photo was taken). He was also one of the organizers for that conference and for another in Siena, Italy in 2004, and he is organizing a special session in algebraic geometry at the AMS regional meeting to be held at UNL in 2005.

Dr. Gwendolen Hines is a former co-chair of the organizing committee. She does research in dynamical systems, specializing in delay equations. She has mentored several undergraduate research projects. She has been very active in programs for girls and women and is a co-founder of the All Girls/All Math program. She is also faculty adviser for the Women's Undergraduate Math Network, an undergraduate organization for women interested in mathematics. She organized the 1995 Dynamical Systems Workshop in Nebraska and led undergraduate research groups during the 2002 and 2004 Nebraska REUs in Applied Mathematics.

Dr. Glenn Ledder is an Associate Professor in the department. His research area is mathematical modeling in the physical and biological sciences, and he is also active in developing an undergraduate mathematics curriculum for biology students. He has supervised groups of three REU Site students in the summers of 2002 and 2003 and is currently supervising a UNL undergraduate student doing a UCARE (Undergraduate Creative Activities & Research Experiences) project.

Dr. Richard Rebarber has been on the committee for all but the first conference. His research area is control of infinite dimensional systems. He has supervised nine undergraduate honors theses projects, seven of which were financially supported by the National Science Foundation, either as part of an individual research grant, or as REU Supplements to individual research grants. He is the co-principal investigator for our REU site in Applied Mathematics, supervised four REU site students in the summer of 2003, and seven REU Site Students in 2005. In 1999 Dr. Rebarber was the organizer of an NSF-CBMS Research Conference on ``Mathematical Control Theory of Coupled Systems of Partial Differential Equations'', with principal lecturer Irena Lasiecka.

Dr. Judy Walker has been a member of the organizing committee since the conference's inception and currently is chair of the committee. Her research in algebraic coding theory has been continuously supported by NSF since she earned her PhD in 1996, and she has been very active in encouraging girls and women to study mathematics. As mentioned above, she is a co-founder of the All Girls/All Math program, and she is also an elected member of the AWM Executive Committee. She was the lecturer for the undergraduate portion of the IAS/PCMI Mentoring Program for Women in 1999 and for the DIMACS- and NSF-sponsored RECONNECT workshop at Salem State College in 2003. She is the lead principal investigator on the department's Mentoring through Critical Transition Points grant from the National Science Foundation.

Melissa Desjarlais is a fifth year graduate student in the Ph.D. program in the department. She is interested in Combinatorics and Graph Theory. She has worked with both Power Math and All Girls/All Math. She attended the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in 2000 as an undergraduate, and gave a talk about the number of spanning trees in grid graphs. She has been on the organizing committee since 2002.

Raegan Higgins is a third year graduate student in the Mathematics Ph.D. program studying Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems. She completed her Master's Degree in May 2004. She attended the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in 2001 as an undergraduate, and gave a talk about nonlinear dynamic equations on time scales. As a result of attending the conference, Raegan participated in the 2001 Nebraska REU in Applied Mathematics. She was also a panelist on the 2003 Panel Discussion entitled The Graduate School Experience.

Shannon Jessie is a second year graduate student in the Mathematics Ph.D. program. She is interested in Applied Mathematics, namely Population Dynamics and Mathematical Biology. She participated in the 2003 Nebraska REU in Applied Mathematics. Shannon attended the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in 2004 as an undergraduate and gave a talk about invasion dynamics concerning predator-prey models.

Deanna Turk is a second year graduate student in the Mathematics Ph.D. program. She attended the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in 2002 and 2003 as an undergraduate, and gave a talk about probability and genome reconstruction.

Laurel Burk is a second year undergraduate in the mathematics and physics departments. She is active in the UNL Math Club and is also co-president of the Women's Undergraduate Math Network. She is currently assisting in high energy physics research at UNL and hopes to pursue a research career after graduate school.