Over the past 18 months members of our department have been awarded an extraordinary number of large and prestigious grants from federal and private sources. External funding not only supports the research and educational missions of our program but also recognizes the highest level of academic competitiveness, productivity, and innovative vision of the many proposers and collaborators among our faculty.
Two especially transformative successes include a Research Training Group (RTG) grant, awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and a teaching technology (Ximera) development grant, funded through the US Department of Education (DoE). Both are multi-year awards of more than two million dollars, and they are both run exclusively by principal investigators and personnel from our department.
The NSF RTG grant will support a carefully designed, vertically integrated scientific training program that is thematically centered around the Arithmetic, Combinatorics, and Topology of Algebraic Varieties. It establishes a mentoring network to benefit and connect undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral scholars through a wide range of activities and opportunities. Its components include research training workshops and conferences led my world renown experts, post-doctoral and graduate student research positions, targeted topics courses, scientific career preparation activities as well as research experiences for undergraduates (REUs) that build on and expand successful REU programs in our department. Particular attention is given to the advancement of students and post-docs from traditionally underrepresented groups, utilizing existing affiliations of our department with the National Math Alliance and similar national organizations.
The proposers and principal investigators (PI and co-PIs) of the NSF RTG are Professors Stefan Patrikis, David Anderson, Angelica Cueto, and Jennifer Park, who will be running activities during the 5-years funding period with the support of eleven additional senior personnel from our department in the general areas of algebra, combinatorics, and algebraic geometry. They envision that the grant “will prepare a new generation of researchers in algebraic geometry and related fields, with an emphasis on the subject's wealth of perspectives and consequently deep interactions with other mathematical fields."
Prior major NSF training grants have included an RTG grant in pure and applied topology (2016-2022) as well as a cross-disciplinary VIGRE grant (2003-2007). They have positively impacted the research training culture in our department with activities that are enduring long beyond the funding period and elevated our national visibility. The new NSF-RTG grant will surely have a similar impact in shaping the scientific future of our department for many years.
The Ximera development grant, entitled Fortifying Open Education: Scaling Ximera for Enduring Impact, is led by Professors James Fowler and Bart Snapp. Ximera is an open-source software platform that allows instructors to readily create interactive electronic learning materials, which are then implemented and delivered as online courses and textbooks. The application was developed by the PIs over the past 14 years in part as a framework for the MOOCulus (Massive Open Online Calculus), a massive open online course (MOOC) conceived and created by Professor Fowler in 2012.
The innovative and versatile Ximera technology provides access to affordable open education resources on a broad scale, achieving sustainable savings for students through expanded use of open textbooks in high-enrollment courses. The $2,125,000 funds, awarded by the US Department of Education’s Open Textbooks Pilot Program, will allow the PIs to expand the use of the platform to a consortium of about a dozen partnering universities. Local collaborators on this project include Alex Borland, Parisa Fatheddin, Brad Findell, Caroline Johns, Elizabeth Miller, Jason Miller, Bob Ramsey, Jenny Sheldon, James Talamo, Michael Tychonievich, who tirelessly continue to develop of the software components and its associated pedagogical content.
Additionally, the Ximera project subsidizes Flash Grants up to $5,000 to individual educators who seek assistance or incentives to implement and improve Ximera applications and Ximera based courses. These initiatives underscore the collaborative trans-institutional nature of the project, which thus promises impact and change higher education globally and long after funding ends in 2026.
Two further multi-million-dollar grants were won by groups of research teams spread over multiple departments, each of which included members of our department. One was awarded to a collaboration across four universities by Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program funded by the Department of Defense (DoD). The other is an NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) grant in quantum information science and engineering (QISE), shared by several STEM departments on the OSU campus.
The winning proposal for MURI DoD grant on the Mathematics of Digital Twins was submitted by a group of researchers from four universities, namely, Stanford, Caltech, UC San Diego, and Ohio State. The team includes Professors Dongbin Xiu and Maria Han Veiga from our department. A total of only 30 highly competitive MURI awards were made this year nationwide to researchers across 73 institutions, each averaging $7.5 million over a five-year funding period. The MURI program has contributed immensely to current and future military capabilities and produced numerous commercial sector applications.
Professor Xiu and Veiga’s project is the only one that received funding under the MURI topic “A New Mathematical Paradigm for Integrating Data, Models, Decisions”, which is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). It brings $2,134,000 to our department over the course of the next five years, supporting research on the mathematical underpinnings of digital twins, a cutting-edge modeling technology with wide-ranging applications also in civilian areas such as manufacturing, construction, and health care.
The NRT-QSIE grant provides three million dollars to establish “a new interdisciplinary degree program for convergent research and graduate training in quantum information science and engineering” over a period of five years to several units on the Ohio State campus. Principal investigators include David Penneys from our department as well as Jay Gupta (Physics), Ronald Reano (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Roberto Myers (Materials Science and Engineering), Syedah Zahra Atiq (Computer Science and Engineering), and Hannah Shafaat (Chemistry and Biochemistry). Numerous more faculty members from these departments will lead or participate in the proposed activities.
The new graduate degree in QISE meets a national need as an entirely novel and highly interdisciplinary program that is not traditionally housed in a single academic department. It includes a compact common core of QISE courses, many of them newly developed and others providing foundations in mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, as well as supplementary graduate modules to accommodate varying disciplinary interests of its trainees. Students will engage in QISE research right from the start and have access to relevant industry internships.
The grant will support the full curricular development of doctoral, master’s, and graduate certificate programs in QISE, including the detailed design of specialized interdisciplinary courses and materials, institutional approval, and instructional resources. It will further directly fund 25 trainees over the award period. The program will also develop graduate internships, sponsored research projects, and, thus, create a long-term, sustainable model for graduate research and traineeship in QISE that may serve as a blueprint for future programs at other universities.
Besides these high-stakes multi-million-dollar grants, many individual faculty members have brought in grants to support their personal scientific projects. Notably, Professors Michael Lipnowski and Caroline Terry won NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards this year in their respective research areas. The CAREER is the most prestigious recognition bestowed by NSF to tenure-track Assistant Professors, “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” Each award supports a wide range of early career building activities with a budget of nearly half a million dollar, extending over a 5-year funding period.
Over the past year and a half NSF further approved several larger Collaborative Research proposals on which colleagues of ours were PIs, leading groups of scientists from several research institutions. They include Professors Adrian Lam, Facundo Memoli, Dustin Mixon, and Yulong Xing. The projects emphasize topics in applied mathematics and data science that are of considerable current scientific and societal interests. Grant amounts range from $110,000 to $300,000 and run between two and three years.
Traditional NSF proposals submitted by individual faculty members to specific subdisciplines in the division of mathematics sciences (DMS) also fared very well. New or continuing grants that were awarded in Spring 2023 or later ranged from $156,000 to $332,000 over a typical 3-year period. The PIs on them and their respective DMS programs are Andriy Gogolyev (Analysis), Daniel Thompson (Analysis), Jean-François Lafont (Topology), Jingyin Huang (Topology), Gabriel Conant (Foundations), Beibei Liu (Topology), and Cesar Cuenca (Probability).
Substantial external support for conferences and travel contributed to the scientific life in our department as well. Most notably, NSF funding was renewed for another three years for the Young Mathematicians Conference (YMC). YMC is a national-reach undergraduate research conference that has been hosted annually by our department since 2003. It routinely attracts over 150 applications from students from all over the US, of which only about half are competitively selected for invitation by a nationwide panel of professors.
The current team of YMC organizers includes Professors Liz Vivas (PI), Jim Fowler, Dusty Grundmeier, John Holmes, and John Johnson. Additionally, NSF funded numerous regular disciplinary conferences at our department over the past 18 months, including those of Professors Gaith Hiary, Jingyin Huang, Kenneth Koenig, Grzegorz Rempala, and Krystal Taylor. And the Simons Foundation awarded travel grants to Professors Roy Joshua, Hoi Nguyen, and Krystal Taylor.
