News
A message from our Department Head, Dr. John Harding:Another busy year. We have about half a dozen PhD students graduating, and all are placed in good positions varying from tenure-track spots to stable teaching positions to national labs and postdocs. Congratulations to them all, especially at a time with so much turmoil in academia. Our new tenure-track topologist Keegan Boyle is off to a fine start and a great addition to the department, and it feels like our other recent hires have been here for years. Our first two postdocs have finished their 2-year term: Arvind Kumar is coming back for a third year as a department-funded postdoc, and Yang Hu is going to another postdoc in Regina. We have hired two new 2-year postdocs to start in August. Menevse Paulovicks, who works in functional analysis and operator algebras, is coming to us from a postdoc at ASU and Dean Spyropoulos, a topologist, is coming after completing his PhD at Michigan State. Along with our grant-funded postdoc Andre Kornell, we will have 4 postdocs next year, which makes for an exciting research environment. The internal funding of a postdoc, and the courses that they teach, allows us to reduce to 2-1 the teaching load of some excellent researchers that have a large service load, something that has long been a problem for us. In addition to these postdocs, our recently graduated student Chau Hoang joins us as a College Assistant Professor to fill the spot vacated by Kevin Meek and we have hired Joe Paulson as a Visiting College Assistant Professor that will help to take some of the burden of our growing Global offerings.The role of our department in NMSU Global continues its rapid growth. We are currently offering about 20 sections in the fall, another 20 in the spring, and 7 in the summer. This amounts to about 3000 SCH per year, a substantial amount. The demand has grown each semester, and it is possible that these figures could double over the next 3 years. So far, all of our offerings have been as service courses, but we now have approvals to move forward with an undergraduate major through Global: “Statistics for Data Science” that will implement some upper-level undergraduate courses as well. Our work with Global supports an essential part of the university and it also provides many benefits to our department. Over the past 10 years salaries for GAs have gone up considerably, probably 50%, and the funding that we receive from the grad school has not kept pace with this. By having faculty develop and oversee Global classes and GA’s teach them (with salaries for the GA’s paid by Global) we are able to support as many graduate students as in the past and to pay reasonably good salaries that in most cases include partial summer support. Global also provides departments with a percentage of the tuition revenue that they generate, something that allowed us to internally fund a postdoc this year, and something that we hope to be able to continue in future. Research in the department is going strong. Thanks to generous support from donors and to faculty and students being diligent in seeking external sources of support, there is a higher level of research travel than I’ve seen in my time at NMSU. Our faculty attend conferences all over the world and we are able to support visitors for colloquia and some longer-term visitors as well. The majority of our graduate students now attend at least one conference, workshop or summer school per year. We just held a large logic conference, the North American meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, with many students participating in the organization, and many faculty have organized conferences and workshops at different venues. A sour note is that the current national climate has impacted several grants in our department. Louiza Fouli was co-PI on a 5-year grant to improve STEM classrooms that was cancelled, and I was an unfunded participant on a MURI on quantum computing led through Harvard that was cancelled. So far there are no direct effects on our department from the cutbacks in grant overhead, but these are things that will affect the university as a whole. We continue with opportunities for our undergraduates. We have made permanent a summer REU for our students led by one of our postdocs. This summer Yang Hu has a group of 3 of our undergraduates working on problems in topology. We also have a 5-year Research Training Group in Logic and Its Application funding 5 undergraduates and 2 graduate students each year working on problems in logic. In the past year or so, three undergraduates are co-authors with faculty and postdocs of papers submitted to good quality journals. We initiated a seminar series for undergraduates last year and aim to continue this for the coming year. Problems with the department include the ongoing struggle with space caused by the Walden Hall closure. There is no end of this in sight. Also problematic is the math readiness of incoming students. Over the past few years proficiency scores in the high schools dropped precipitously, and New Mexico is no longer among the states with the lowest scores, we are by far the lowest in the country. The high schools will no longer require Algebra II to graduate, so matters will only become worse. We have many initiatives to try to address the problem, but this is a difficult issue. Finally, our number of majors is lower than we would like. This is common in math departments, but ours is lower than in many comparable institutions. This is perhaps reflective of a population with comparatively poor math skills. But we work hard to attract new majors, and in particular are making a dual-degree arrangement with the Autonomous U. of Chihuahua, and hopefully can lift our numbers. While we have somewhat fewer majors than we would like, many of our majors are very strong and a real pleasure to teach. The past years have seen us go from an older top-heavy department to a much younger one. We have hired 7 tenure-track faculty, 8 college faculty, and 1 staff member, and from these have retained all but one college faculty who fulfilled his dream of moving to Alaska. To pat ourselves on the back, we made great hires --- fine researchers and teachers who fit in well and make for a great atmosphere. This young core of faculty together with substantial help from our donors and opportunities presented through Global put us on solid ground to build for the future. About the DepartmentThe department offers courses in mathematics and statistics leading to the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degree. At the Bachelor’s level we have several options for career preparation, such as applied mathematics and actuarial science. |
1290 Frenger Mall
MSC 3MB / Science Hall 236
Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003-8001
