Local News Briefs

September 2009, The National Library of Medicine awarded a two-year grant for $700,000 to Loren Cobb (PI), Jan Mandel (Co-PI), and Jon Beezley (post-doc) to develop an improved system for tracking emerging epidemic diseases using advanced filtering techniques first developed by Mandel and Beezley for tracking prairie wildfires. The State of Colorado's Emergency Preparedness and Response Division (Chris Lindley, Director) will participate in this grant.

June 2009, Loren Cobb participated in a classified conference with the nation's top military commanders (four-star generals and admirals). Dr. Cobb represented the academic modeling and simulation community. The conference took place at the National Defense University in Washington, DC.

April 2009, Two Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences faculty, Jan Mandel and Loren Cobb, submitted a grant to the National Institutes of Health to use what has been learned from modeling the spread of a wildfire to modeling the spread of disease. This project aired on April 29, 2009, on Channel 7 News.

April 2009, Math graduate students participated in an NSF-sponsored GK-12 grant, working with local middle schools. This project was highlighted on Channel 9 News in two separate stories, one aired on April 8, 2009, and one aired on February 4, 2009. This UCD GK12 project won a media award from the NSF.

April 2009, The UC Denver undergraduate team of Nuch Aminian, Michelle Rendon, and Lee Rosenberg participated in the 2009 COMAP-sponsored MCM Math Modeling Competition and received a rating of Meritorious. This rating placed them in the top 18% of those who competed from around the world. Only 9 out of the 1,675 teams that competed received a higher ranking. Congratulations!

May 2008, Andrew Knyazev is a 2008 Excellence in Research and Creative Activities Award winner.

June 2007, "An algebraic theory for primal and dual substructuring methods by constraints," by Jan Mandel, Clark Dohrmann, and Radek Tezaur, was identified by ISI as a Fast Breaking, highly cited paper. Only one math or statistics paper gets this distinction every two months.

March 2007, INFORMS Computing Society, the premier organization for computing and operations research, has renamed its service award in honor of Harvey Greenberg. The "Harvey J. Greenberg Award for Service to ICS," formerly called the "ICS Service Award," was renamed for Greenberg's dedication and long history of service to the organization. The first award will be presented at the 11th ICS Conference in 2009. The Harvey J. Greenberg award will be granted once every two years to an ICS member of at least five years who has contributed significantly to ICS and its objectives. Quoting department chair Mike Jacobson, "This unique distinction, renamed after Harvey, for his devoted service to the INFORMS organization, is only a small indicator of the time and effort that he has devoted to the profession and university."