Alumni Honors

We celebrate our alumni success. Read about some of our Mathematics alumni success stories of our recent graduates.

Mathematics students looking for an academically challenging experience can apply to enroll in the Honors College. Honors students have gone on to continue their educational careers or landed competitive industry jobs. Here are some of our recent Honors graduates:

• Shawn Koohy (2024; BS in Mathematics). Shawn won the 2024 Outstanding Scholarship by an Undergraduate Student Award, which is awarded to only one student each year in all STEM disciplines. Shawn’s worked with Dr. Yanlai Chen on applications of neural networks. He has an impressive publication record, with two journal papers and one about to be submitted. He has been accepted to several top graduate programs in applied mathematics.
• Rebecca Rodrigues (2023; BS in Mathematics). While pursuing her mathematics degree, Rebecca was an active mathematics tutor and in-class learning assistant. Over the summer, Rebecca obtained multiple competativ internships at NWUC, and over her final year, she undertook an honors project, "A Python package for near-field-to-far-field algorithms." Before graduating, Rebecca had multiple PhD offers as well as job offers from NWUC and Raytheon. She recently began her PhD program in computational mathematics at RIT.
• Miya Spinella (2021; BS in Mathematics). While pursuing her mathematics degree, Miya realized a passion for computational mathematics and data science. In fact, she's the first student to be award the new Data Science Minor at UMassD! Miya had multiple PhD offers form top-tier statistics programs. She ultimately decided to start her career at Chase Bank as a Production System Analyst in Chicago.
• Taylor Jacobs (2020; BS in Mathematics with Computational track and Civil Engineering). Taylor was busy as a double major, juggling a Civil Engineering degree along with a BS in Mathematics (Applied and Computational Mathematics track). While at UMassD Tyler also engaged with a multi-year research project working on asphalt recovery and repurposing as well as Mathematics Intern at the NAVSEA Warfare Centers (NSWC/NUWC). Tyler quickly got a job after graduating -- he will be designing bridges for a local engineering company.
• Dilruba Sofia (2020; BS in Mathematics). While pursuing her mathematics degree, Dilruba was an active mathematics tutor and participated in the Texas A&M REU program in Mathematical Biology. She will continue pursuing her research in Mathematical Biology at UMass Amherst, who will be funding her PhD program as part of a  5-year teaching assistantship. 
• Courtney Burns (2019; BS in Mathematics and Business Administration Minor). Courtney came to UMassD as an aspiring actuary and undertook her honors project exploring "Self-Esteem, Responsibility, and Financial Risk Aversion in Young People." Courtney's interest in actuarial work grew through her summer internship at OneBeacon Insurance Group. She made quite an impression on them, and she was offered a job at OneBeacon immediately after graduating!
• Hannah Smith (2018; BA in Mathematics and Psychology). In addition to double majoring, Hannah was the captain of the Softball team and undertook an honors research project on factors involved in undergraduate positive and negative attitudes to mathematics. Hannah is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at WPI, where she continues to develop data-driven approaches to improving mathematics education.
• Derek Marshall (2018; BS in Mathematics and minor in Physics). As a captain of the UMassD swimming team, Derek stayed busy outside of the classroom too. Through a collaboration with MIT's Broad Institute, he undertook a challenging year-long project "Utilizing Transcription Factors and Feature Reduction Methods to Determine Drug Response in Cancer Cells". Over the summer he landed a prestigious internship position at CapitalOne's data analytic divisions in Austin, Texas. He now works at CapitalOne as a Senior Business Analyst.
• Kimberly Matsuda (2018; BS in Mathematics). While pursuing her mathematics degree, Kim was an active mathematics tutor through the STEM learning center. Over multiple years she has tutored students in multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, and program. She was also involved in a multi-year research project (partially funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA) to develop accurate methods to extract gravitational waves from numerical simulations. Kim will join RPI's computational mathematics Ph.D. program with a teaching scholarship.
• Rebecca Pereira (2017; BS in Mathematics). As part of her honors research project, Rebecca explored how mathematics writing can promote the inclusion of underrepresented groups in mathematics. Rebecca is continuing her Ph.D. studies at UMassD through the EAS-CSE program. She works with Professors Yanlai Chen and Bo Dong developing novel discontinuous Galerkin methods for simulations involving solitons and other non-linear wave behaviors.