My Blended Family

I have enjoyed spending time with and getting to know my family members, Lonna, EJ, and Marlon, during our weekly meetings.  However, deciding on either an "interdisciplinary" topic or a topic to approach in a "cross-disciplinary" manner proved to be a challenge.  Although at first glances our backgrounds in math (me and EJ), electrical engineering (Lonna), and educational policy with an interest in STEM education (Marlon) might seem conducive to some type of collaboration, we quickly realized there was no completely natural route for our research to take.  EJ and I found ourselves especially challenged as we racked our brains to come up with a relevant way to incorporate our summer research projects or our even broader spectrum of research interests going into our PhD's.  As pure mathematicians it is almost given that our work will have little to no applications outside of mathematics and, in addition, that the applications it does have will be sought out and developed not by us, but by applied mathematics, statisticians, engineers, and computer scientists.

After much discussion and several trial runs, we eventually landed on a topic.  We decided to look at the factors that contribute to the disproportionately low amount of diverse students in STEM fields and see if that proportion can be positively affected by informing students of the benefits that careers within STEM fields, more specifically within solar technology, can provide.  We will attempt to ascertain these factors through surveys of students in K-12 grades.  My role, along with EJ, is to use the data we gather to create quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure the different factors influencing students in their pursuit, or lack thereof, of STEM education.  This is a far cry from the research I am doing this summer in mathematical logic, nonetheless, I hope to draw upon my mathematical foundation in analysis and topology in the development and analysis of these metrics.