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By RJ Braun
October 16, 2020
Each year at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Annual Meeting, the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) organizes a graduate student poster session for young women mathematicians. The poster session is judged, and this year's best poster award went to fifth year graduate student Rayanne Luke. Her poster was titled "Parameter Estimation for Mixed-Mechanism Tear Film Thinning."
This year's poster session was different due to the pandemic. The Second Joint SIAM/CAIMS Annual Meeting was originally scheduled for Toronto, Canada, but all sessions were virtual. The poster session consisted of seven-minute recorded presentations. A variety of technologies could be used to accomplish the presentation; Rayanne chose to create an mp4 from a recorded talk in Microsoft PowerPoint. She gave a very polished and practiced talk that apparently impressed the judges. The poster session was open to all areas of mathematics; in this case, it reflected the themes of the conference. A shortened version of the presentation is available online.
She also participated in the AWM Graduate Student Workshop. AWM funds about a dozen women to attend this SIAM workshop, anchoring them to the larger applied math community and inviting them to present their research at the judged AWM Poster Session. These sessions foster networking among participants in the selected topical theme, and allowing for further mentoring from women leaders in the field.
The award comes with enrollment in a North American Mathematical Sciences Institute event with basic expenses paid.
Her co-authors on the poster included her PhD advisor Richard Braun, fellow UD Mathematical Sciences Professor Tobin Driscoll, and Indiana University School of Optometry members Professor Carolyn Begley and her student Deborah Awisi-Gyau.
Congratulations, Rayanne!
