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Spend a Summer with a Scientist

Richard Tapia, Director

1989-1998


NOTE: The SaS program has been expanded and replaced by the DGPSE.

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The Spend a Summer with a Scientist (SaS) program at Rice University provides opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in university activities and work for the summer under the guidance of center researchers.

For more information on this program, contact Theresa Chatman, Manager of Outreach Programs, at tlc@cs.rice.edu or (713) 285-5180.

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Program Description

(Left to right) SaS students Diane Jamrog, Carlos Uribe, and Pamela Williams mentor UH-D's PREP high school students.
In 1989, the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), a Science and Technology Center sponsored by the National Science Foundation, implemented the "Spend a Summer with a Scientist (SaS)" program at Rice University. The program provides opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to participate in university activities and work for the summer under the guidance of center researchers. A stipend is provided to accepted students to cover their living expenses. Directed by Dr. Richard Tapia, Noah Harding professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University, the program exposes students to research and motivates them to attend graduate school in science, mathematics, or engineering. In addition to center researchers, SaS participants also work with computational science researchers from five different departments at Rice and researchers from the Keck Center for Computational Biology, a collaboration between Rice, the Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of Houston. Diversity in applicants is encouraged. A total of 81 students have participated in the Rice SaS program from 1989-1998. Most past participants in this program are either currently enrolled in graduate school or planning to apply.

SaS student Regina Hill presents to the teachers in the GirlTECH program about her work in computational mathematics.
Research projects for participants in previous SaS programs have included working on partial differential equations, writing optimization code for use in the design of digital electronics, and implementing new methods of straightening fibers within electron micrographs. Other projects included compilation and analysis of ozone data collected for the Texas Air Control Board, development of a performance calculation module for the M/M/c/q queuing system with exponential abandonment, and mapping the mitochondrial DNA of two Rana species to determine the mechanism of gene regulation. At the end of the summer, participants submit papers describing their research experiences with the program.

A component of the program centers around discussions and activities that promote a general awareness of societal and other issues, including diversity.

Profiles of some student participants appear below.


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Student Profiles

Sarah Benkendorf
Houston, TX
Sarah has been working with Tapia on developing a high school curriculum in computational and applied mathematics, which would introduce students to a new and expanding field using the math that they want to learn. Sarah is currently a graduate student in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

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Kimberly Blackwell
Baltimore, MD
Kimberly recently completed her B.A. in mathematics and computer science at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. She spent the summer of 1991 working with Joel Castellanos at Rice, writing a basketball simulation program using physics principles. Kimberly's advisor at Sweet Briar recommended her for the SaS program in hopes of motivating her to go to graduate school. She is now taking additional mathematics courses at the University of Maryland and is firmly committed to applying to a Ph.D. program.

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Shawn Brooks
Flushing, NY
At the time of his participation, Shawn was a senior at Rice University majoring in physics, with an emphasis on space science, and German. In the 1994 SaS program he worked with Anthony Chan, researching the origins and effects of large-scale oscillations in the Earth's magnetic field and in associated particle fluxes.

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Corey Butler
Shepherd, TX
Corey attended Prairie View A&M University where he studied computer engineering technology. He spent the summer of 1994 in the SaS program working with Castellanos, Debbie Campbell, and Gil Hansen, learning about software programs such as Word Perfect 5.0 and Excel 4.0. He became acquainted with Xmosaic, the World Wide Web, UNIX, and Photoshop. He also learned computer languages such as Perl and C.

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Lynda Caine-Barrett
Houston, TX
Lynda is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Rice University with a focus on international relations and conflict. She worked under the mentorship of Dr. T. Clifton Morgan this summer to investigate the Unites States' continuing commitment to foreign aid and development in other countries. She worked to understand what the U.S. really gets for its aid dollars.

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Felicia Carmouche
Stafford, TX
Felicia is a senior mathematics and computer science major at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. In 1991, she worked with Castellanos to build RICEPS, a benchmark suite of FORTRAN programs used to test FORTRAN compilers. RICEPS is available on electronic software distribution systems (netlib@ornl.gov and softlib@rice.edu) for national distribution.

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Aaron Castenell
Houston, TX
Aaron, a graduate student of biochemistry at Rice University, spent the summer of 1994 in the SaS program under the supervision of John Olson, researching the comparative rates of heme loss in hemoglobin among alpha and beta subunits. He is a National Merit semifinalist and a National Achievement Scholar.

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William A. Christian
Houston, TX
William is a graduate student at Rice University in the Computational and Applied Mathematics department. In the summer of 1996 he worked with Dr. William Symes to examine several different approaches to deconvolution or inversion.

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Martha Contreras
Riverside, CA
In the summer of 1991, Martha collaborated with Tapia on a CRPC technical report entitled, "Sizing the BFGS and DFP Updates: A Numerical Study." The report was submitted as a paper to the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications. Martha also gave an oral presentation of the paper at the ICIAM 91 International Conference in July 1991. In 1992, she again worked with Tapia and with Hiroshi Yabe on additional research related to the paper. Martha completed her dissertation in partial differential equations and received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Riverside in June 1993.

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Boris Coto
Houston, TX
Boris spent the summer of 1996 investigating the phase problem -- what is it, where it occurs, and the importance of solving it. He wrote and implemented in Matlab several mathematical models that should reflect the physical phenomenon of the phase problem. He tested different options which present an overview of which models provide a better interpretation of the problem.

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Stacey Crear
Houston, TX
Stacey graduated from Prairie View A&M University in 1994 with a B.S. in computer engineering technology and computer science, and has begun graduate studies at the University of Houston. She has participated in the SaS program for three years. In the summer of 1995, Stacey worked with Mark Gockenbach on implementing a resizable matrix class, which would allow the user to change the size of the matrix without going in and physically changing the dimensions. In 1993, Stacey worked with Doug Moore of the Rice Computer Science Department. She learned about ways of improving the software program for the marching cubes technique used in computer graphics. She also participated in the 1992 SaS program and worked on a frequency divider for John Bennett of the Rice Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Among other honors, Stacey is a member of Epsilon Pi Tau, is the secretary for the Prairie View A&M National Technical Association, and has been on the Dean's List for six semesters.

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Hiwot Desta
McLean, VA
Hiwot heard about the SaS program from Nina Hernandez and Felicia Carmouche, two other SaS participants. In 1992, he worked with W. E. Billups on carbon-60 work in chemistry. Goals for the project involved the isolation of carbon-60 from a graphite rod and the determination of the different chemical properties of this newly found molecule. Hiwot received a B.S. in chemistry from Sweet Briar College. He is the recipient of the James Lewis Howe Award in Chemistry and is listed in Who's Who Among American Colleges and Universities.

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Rudy Elizondo
San Antonio, TX
From 1991-1993, Rudy participated in the SaS program to research his master's thesis project with E. A. Boyd. His project involved solving a large-scale semi-assignment program, a particular type of linear program involving data from the Houston Independent School District. The project's objective was to find the "optimal" school districts in terms of demographics. Rudy is interested in the coding of the C programming language as well as in research on parallel linear and integer programming. In 1994, he earned an M.A. in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

His research papers include:

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Edward Smith Eusery
Killeen, TX
In the summer of 1993, Edward worked with Andrew Meade of the Rice Mechanical Engineering Department on airfoil optimization. Using mathematical applications, physics, and computer design, he created a wing with maximum lift and minimal drag. Edward was interested in the SaS program for the research experience. His achievements include the Presidential Honor Roll, National Dean's List, and membership in Epsilon Pi Tau, the American Design and Drafting Association, and Alpha Phi Omega. He majored in industrial design at Prairie View A&M University.

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Patricia Garcia
Houston, TX
Patricia has participated in the SaS program for five years in a row. Patricia spent the summer of 1992 working with Bob Stein and Rick Wilson of the Rice Department of Political Science on a Houston crime survey. Information on crime fears and perceptions were analyzed and combined with information on income, gender, neighborhood, age, and other factors. This project helped her get acquainted with the Department of Political Science at Rice, where she started graduate work in the fall of 1992. She spent the summer of 1993 working with Stein on voter registration and early voting patterns in Texas. In 1994, she studied the institutional influence of governing coalitions and policy adaptation under the guidance of Stein. During the summer of 1995, Patricia collaborated with colleague Holly Teeters on a project overseen by Stein and Christopher Anderson. They worked to produce a fully specified casual model of voter turnout, taking into consideration variance in voter turnout levels both across countries and over time. They gathered data and compiled a pooled cross-sectional time series statistical analysis. She spent the summer of 1996 working with Dr. Stein again, this time on quantifying the voting patterns of voters in Harris County. Her achievements include the Inroads Academic Achievement award, a New Jersey Project Honorable Mention, and a "Hispanics: Houston's Under-represented Constituency" award for her undergraduate thesis. She received a B.A. from Princeton University in June 1992 and is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Rice.

Her publications include

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John Garza
El Paso, TX
John's goal in the SaS program was to gain valuable research experience that would help him later on in his career, either in graduate school or as a professional engineer. In 1992, he worked with Panos Da Koulas, which is a software program that gives engineers an easier method to design and analyze foundations for erected structures. After receiving a B.S. in civil engineering from Rice University in December 1993, John participated in the program again in 1994. That summer he worked with Joel Conte and Phil Bedient on the probabilistic surface water hydrologic structures in preparation for his master's thesis in civil engineering. His achievements include the Rice University President's Honor Roll, a LULAC National Scholarship, and a National Hispanic Scholarship.

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Jeremy Griffin
Dallas, TX
In 1994, Jeremy took part in the program under the mentorship of Campbell and Hansen with the intention of preparing himself for graduate work in the future. He learned how to use Unix, the World Wide Web, Framemaker, Photoshop, Xmosaic and a variety of other systems and software. Jeremy is currently pursuing a B.S. in computer engineering technology at Prairie View A&M University.

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Steven Harris
Houston, TX
Steven participated in the 1993 SaS program in order to gain more insight into his software engineering major. He worked with Castellanos on the Virtual Notebook System, which was developed at Baylor College of Medicine. He graduated from Prairie View A&M University, where he was on both the Dean's List and the Honor Roll.

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Nina Hernandez
Houston, TX
Through the SaS program, Nina hopes to get an idea of what academic research is like. In 1992 and 1993, Nina worked with Amr El-Bakry and Tapia to implement a program that reads a standard linear programming matrix and converts it to a standard commercial format known as MPS. She also studied theories relevant to optimization research. During 1991, Nina worked with Mary Hall on the reimplementation of a FORTRAN compiler for a parallel processor. Her work included call graph structure and data flow problems. She had originally heard about the program through a contact at the National Science Foundation. Among her many academic achievements, she is a Sweet Briar College (SBC) Richards Scholar and a member of Rho Omega, the Hispanic Honor Society. She also has published articles in the SBC Honors Journal. Nina received a B.S. in mathematics and computer science from Sweet Briar College in May 1992 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Rice.

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Illya Hicks
Waco, TX
A graduate cum laude of Southwest Texas State University with a B.S. in mathematics (May 1995), Ilya spent the summer of 1995 in the SaS program under the tutelage of Sandra Santos. His project was the comparison of the conjugate gradient method and the BFGS quasi-Newton method to quadratic programming and non-linear programming problems. Illya was accepted to the graduate program at Rice University for the fall of 1995 with the goal of obtaining a Ph.D. in operations research.

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Regina Hill
Houston, TX
Regina graduated from Rice University with a B.A. in computational and applied mathematics in May 1996. For her, the SaS program was an opportunity to see the everyday applications of the problem-solving techniques she learned during the school year, as well as a chance to decide whether or not she wants to pursue a career in research. Her project for the summer of 1995 involved the simulation of fluid flow through porous media by means of mathematical modeling, a technique frequently used in petroleum geology to control the leakage of oil from underground tanks and reservoirs. Her faculty mentor was Clint Dawson. During the summer of 1996 she worked with Marcelo Rame on writing a Fortran program to simulate flow through a reservoir. Their goal was to find the pressures of the fluid at different points in the reservoir by using two equations, one to simulate the oil flow and one to simulate the water flow. Regina is the recipient of a Mellon Undergraduate Fellowship in 1994, and is the former president of the National Society of Black Engineers.

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Stephanie Ann Hoogendoorn
Houston, TX
Stephanie wanted to learn more about the use of mathematics and computers in biological research. A junior studying applied mathematics and computer science at the University of Houston (Downtown), she spent the 1995 SaS program under the mentorship of Richard Tapia, Amr El-Bakry, and George Phillips. Her project was to study the "Phase Problem," wherein crystallized proteins are bombarded with X-rays. The rays emerge at different intensities, which are used to calculate the phases of the rays so that the three-dimensional structure of the protein molecules can be more exactly determined. Stephanie plans to graduate from UH in the fall of 1996.

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Clara Jaramillo
New Orleans, LA
Clara participated in the SaS program in 1991 to begin research with her Ph.D. advisor, Keith Cooper. She looked at reassociation of loop invariant code, particularly array subscripts, in order to gain more experience in optimal code research. She not only gained research experience, she also met other students and became more aware of minority issues. Clara is now in the process of completing her Ph.D. studies in computer science at Rice University. She was awarded an NSF Minority Graduate Fellowship.

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Jane Kamuyu
Houston, TX
Jane is pursuing a B.S. in computer engineering technology at Prairie View A&M University. Interested in learning Unix, she participated in the 1994 SaS program under the supervision of Campbell, Castellanos, and Hansen. Her project involved putting the Hispanic Health Journal, a publication of the Baylor College of Medicine, onto the World Wide Web and designing a home page for Prairie View A&M. In the process, she gained valuable experience working on the Internet.

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Anthony Kearsley
Houston, TX
Anthony received his Ph.D. in numerical analysis from Rice University's Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics in May of 1995. In 1994, he participated in the program under the mentorship of Tapia and the University of Houston's Roland Glowinski. His project that year involved the development and analysis of a novel optimization approach to the stimulation of multiphase, nonlinear viscous flow over irregularly shaped regions. The project, which became the basis of his Ph.D. thesis, was motivated by the desire to improve reservoir simulators used by the oil industry in deciding where to locate oil wells. His work resulted in a paper entitled, "Shape Optimization Problems via Fictitious Domain Methods and Nonlinear Interior Point Methods." He also took part in the program in 1993, when he worked with Tapia on the theoretical and computational development of numerical algorithms for the solution of nonlinear distance geometry problems. Anthony received an M.A. in computational and applied mathematics from Rice University in 1994, and a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Maryland, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1990.

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Candace Kendrick
Houston, TX
Candace, an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, participated in the 1996 SaS program under the direction of Leticia Velazquez. Her work involved testing a non-linear interior point solver using CUTE problems. Her academic achievements include a paper presented at LSU on the periodicity of the Fibonacci sequence.

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Silas Kurley
Houston, TX
Silas spent the summer of 1991 at Los Alamos National Laboratories working with Fred Begay and Dave Forslund. During the first half of the summer he developed a working knowledge of the Unix operating system and wrote rudimentary programs for system coordination. Silas' research project consisted of porting a section of code from a particle-in-cell computer code on the CRAY computer to the Connection Machine, a massively parallel computer. To achieve this, he viewed several videotapes describing the philosophy and operation of the Connection Machine and developed the programming skills to use it. He also attended lectures given throughout the summer as a part of the Computational Science Workshop, a three-month training course at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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Armando Lara
Houston, TX
A chemical engineering major at the University of Houston, Armando worked on his SaS project in the summer of 1995 under the tutelage of Todd Arbogast. He was interested in working with leading researchers and advanced technology in his chosen field. His project was to study the flow of fluids through porous media, and the computational techniques used to simulate the process -- a very useful application of mathematical computation in the area of petroleum geology. Armando, who has been on the Dean's List for the past four semesters at UH, is a recipient of that university's "President's Diversity Scholarship for Transfer Students." He won a 1996 GEM Fellowship from the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc.

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Richard Lauder
Mamaroneck, NY
Richard's SaS project in 1992 involved using strategic information systems to assist in management decision-making. This opportunity allowed him to generate new energies and acquire new skills to enhance his future work. His mentor was Albert Napier of the Department of Administrative Science at Rice. Richard is a member of Alpha Beta Gamma, the Business Honor Society, and is currently studying the management of information systems at the New York Institute of Technology.

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Latasha Lock
Denison, TX
During the summer of 1995, Latasha was a senior at Prairie View A&M University majoring in computer engineering technology. She was attracted to the program not only by the opportunity to enhance her knowledge, but by the cultural/ethnic diversity of her fellow participants. Her project for the summer of 1995 was the creation of a World Wide Web tutorial on the C/C++ computer language. In the process of creating the Web-page tutorial, she expanded her knowledge of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and other Unix procedures, such as Gnuemacs editing. Her SaS mentor was Debbie Campbell.

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Griselda Mani
Houston, TX
Griselda is an undergraduate at Rice University studying mechanical engineering. In the 1994 SaS program, she worked with Arbogast on a project involving comparisons of parallel input/output strategies. In the process, she learned about the C programming language and worked extensively in FORTRAN. Then, in the summer of 1995, she used a FORTRAN program to analyze data gathered by XPS (X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy) in order to compare the various possible surface-coating materials used on airplanes. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Excellence Award and the Exxon Math/Science Award. Additionally, Griselda is the current president of Mexican-American Engineers and Scientists (MAES).

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Monica Martinez
San Diego, CA
Monica is working on a Ph.D. in numerical analysis in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) at Rice University. She is currently conducting research on shallow water equations at the Center for Subsurface Modeling led by Mary Wheeler at the University of Texas. Monica's 1995 SaS project was the investigation of a finite element model for surface flow developed by Gray, Kolar, Lvettich, Scheffner, and Westerink. Together with her mentors, Dawson and Mary Wheeler, she proved stability of the system and derived an optimal a priori error estimate. In 1994, she worked with Tapia, Wheeler, and Dawson on numerical schemes designed to solve equations that model chemical reaction rates. With Tapia in 1993, she studied optimization papers dealing with trust region methods and line search methods. This activity gave her experience in reading technical papers and insight into recent optimization research and theory. She has received a Patricia Robert Harris Fellowship for graduate study in the CAAM department and gave a talk at the annual conference sponsored by the Society of Chicanos and Native Americans. In August of 1995, Monica received the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award in recognition of all her student leadership activities. She has also collaborated with Juan Meza from Sandia National Laboratories on a paper published in the Journal of Computational Chemistry. Monica received a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University in March 1992.

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Kiana Matthews
Sugar Land, TX
Kiana is an undergraduate at Furman University studying computer science and mathematics. Her SaS project for the summer of 1995 was solving Poisson's Equation for a variety of functions, working with FORTRAN 90, High Performance FORTRAN, and using different types of iterative methods. Her SaS mentor was Charles Koelbel. Kiana hopes to obtain her B.S. in May 1998.

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Cassandra Moore McZeal
Houston, TX
Cassandra has spent five consecutive summers in the SaS program while pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at Rice. This past summer she continued her project of 1995, which involved studying the use of Interior Point Methods in a Branch and Cut Algorithm for Integer Programming. The summer before that, she worked with Tapia, honing her knowledge of stochastic analysis, integer programming, linear programming, and data structures. In 1993, she spent the summer with Tapia and El-Bakry, testing numerical methods for recovering an optimal linear programming basis from an interior point solution. In 1992, with Dawson and Philip Keenan, Cassandra helped to implement a program in C++ that approximates partial differential equations using the mixed finite element method on triangular grids. In 1991, Cassandra worked with Dawson on solving partial differential equations with computer programs in FORTRAN using the finite element method. That same year, she helped to implement a software package using Multigrid to solve those partial differential equations more efficiently. In addition, she presented papers on her research at the Texas section of the Mathematical Association of America meetings in April 1992 and January 1993. For her academic excellence, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship for the first three years of her graduate study at Rice in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department. Cassandra received a B.A. in mathematics in May 1992 from Southwestern University.

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Santiago Mejia
East Bernard, TX
Prior to graduation from Rice University with a B.S. in Computer Science, Santiago participated twice in the SaS program. In 1990, he worked with Seema Hiranandani of the CRPC, performing transformations to parallelize simple FORTRAN loops. In 1991, he worked with Wah Chiu and Zeljko Jericevic at the Baylor College of Medicine, implementing new methods of straightening fibers within electron micrographs.

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Luis Moreno
El Paso, TX
Currently a chemical engineering and economics major at Rice University, Luis worked in 1991 with Sam Davis and Jackie Shanks of the Rice Chemical Engineering Department, helping them to expand their chemical engineering computer simulation package. He created one additional model to simulate equilibrium reactors, and an on-line help program to access compound data within the ChemShare and Aspen data banks.

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Rafael Moreno
Houston, TX
Rafael is a graduate student at Rice University working on a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. He defended his thesis in June of 1996 and expects to graduate in May 1997. This past summer he continued his project involving the creation of a collection of C++ tools for the rapid implementation of finite element applications. In 1994, he spent the summer with Professors Balasubramaniam Ramaswamy and Andrew Meade working on projects in several areas, including the parallel programming of the Intel Hypercube, the relationship between massively parallel computers and artificial neural networks (ANN), and the use of ANN architectures for the solution of Computational Fluid Dynamic problems in parallel form. Rafael has received many honors and awards, including the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Minority Graduate Fellowship Honorable Mention, Princeton University's Memorial John Marshall II Award in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, a National Hispanic Scholarship Award Program Honorable Mention, and membership in the Sigma Xi Scientific Society.

As a result of his research, four papers have been published:

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Robert Moreno
Missouri City, TX
In his project for the 1992 SaS program, Robert looked at properties of small sets of special statistics. His analysis will be applied to environmental issues, such as rainfall and ground water contamination. His mentors were Kathy Ensor of the Statistics Department and Phil Bedient of the Environmental Science and Engineering Department. Robert was on the Dean's List and won the Patricia Robert Harris Award. His research work has also been published ("Purification of an IgM Class Murine Antibody" in Immunological Methods, 1991 (136), with Victoria P. Knutson, and Ruth Ann Buck, pp. 151-57). Robert received an M.A. in statistics from Rice University in May 1992.

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Ingrid Orellana
Inglewood, CA
Ingrid is pursuing a double major in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. Her motive for participating in the SaS program in the summer of 1995 was to improve her programming skill and gain more experience in the discipline. Her project was to learn the programming language C++ in order to encode various algorithms with it. Once she encoded the algorithms, Ingrid could then decide which ones could be parallelized for more efficient computation. Her mentor for the project was Vikram Adve.

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Albert Ramirez
Pasadena, CA
Albert is pursuing a B.S. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He participated in the 1994 SaS program with Keenan as his mentor. There, he learned about numerical methods and analysis, including identifying dependent and independent variables and establishing relationships between them. He was introduced to parallel programming on the Hypercube and using Unix systems.

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Andrea Reiff
Houston, TX
In the fall of 1991, after obtaining a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Houston, Andrea entered the Ph.D. program in computational and applied mathematics at Rice. In the summer of 1991, she worked with Tapia and Virginia Torczon on extending a multidirectional search algorithm to simple box constraints and linear equalities. She implemented the barrier method and a standard penalty function on the iPSC/860. Andrea also worked on testing the augmented Lagrangian program.

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Holly Teeters Reynolds
Shreveport, LA
Holly is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American political studies at Rice University. During the summer of 1995, under the mentorship of Stein and Christopher Anderson, she continued the research that will become the subject of her thesis: voter turnout in Latin American elections as a function of certain institutional factors. In order to facilitate her research, she and Patricia Garc’a-Monet developed a mathematical model that compares voter turnout in several countries throughout the world and from several eras. She continued her research in 1996 working with Dr. Rick K. Wilson and Dr. Keith Hamm. She has received a National Science Foundation grant, as well as the Ora Arnold Fellowship. She presented her SAS project of 1995 with Garc’a-Monet at a professional conference.

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Jesus Rios
San Antonio, TX
Jesus is currently majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics at the University of Houston. In 1994, he learned several new skills in the SaS program, including the following: Internet navigation, user interface, research techniques, and software development. As a result of his work, an educational computer program dealing with curve fitting was put on-line at the end of the summer.

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John Rodriguez
San Antonio, TX
In 1992, John became acquainted with some of the memory device applications of metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) junctions. With mentor Bill Wilson and researchers from Texas Instruments, John tested these devices and improved upon their design. In the summer of 1990, he worked with John Bennett of the Rice Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, writing a code on the Sequent Symmetry computer that optimized the search for the minimum of a logic function. In 1991, John also worked with Naomi Halas of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, characterizing semiconductor samples with laser experiments. Among other accomplishments, John wrote a paper presented at the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) in San Antonio in January 1992, entitled "Logic Minimization in a Multicomputer Environment." John received a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University in May 1992.

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Thomas Rose
Houston, TX
Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University, participated in the 1995 SaS program with Dawson as his mentor. His project was a comparison of the relative efficiencies of Tarjan's Algorithm and Steward's Algorithm, which are used to find the optimal sequence for a given set of tasks. In 1994, under the tutelage of Raymond Wells, he studied wavelet theory and its applications. Thomas graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas, Permian Basin in 1993 with a B.S. in mathematics and computer science.

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Samitra Seales
Houston, TX
Samitra is an undergraduate studying computational and applied mathematics at Rice University. During the 1996 SaS program, her mentor, Pamela Williams, formulated a project for her that included developing an understanding of various methods that solve Ax=b and utilizing this knowledge to write programs in Matlab.

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Pedro Sepulveda
Houston, TX
Pedro, an undergraduate studying applied mathematics at the University of Houston (Downtown), spent the summer of 1995 under the mentorship of Keenan, expanding his knowledge of how computers are used in mathematical analysis. His research project was a study comparing the simulated results of two different investment methods: single purchase and dollar-cost averaging. Pedro, a member of many academic and community organizations, received his B.S. degree in May 1996.

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Dawn Stephens
Decatur, GA
Dawn participated in the 1993 SaS program, using a helium neon laser to detect microscopic metal objects inside a tissue phantom. The project may have an application in non-invasive, non-ionizing tumor detection. Her mentor was Frank Tittel of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice. Dawn graduated from Clark Atlanta University in May 1994.

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Cesar Taylor
Alamo, TX
In 1992, Cesar Taylor worked with Castellanos developing biochemical models of metabolism. He also gained experience in molecular genetics research from mapping mitochondrial DNA at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. For Cesar, spending the summer with Castellanos was a great opportunity to work on an original project. He received a B.S. in biology from Rice University in May 1992.

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Rosie Tellez
Houston, TX
Rosie was admitted to the graduate program in biochemistry at Rice University for the fall of 1995. She spent the preceding summer working with Janet Braam in the SaS program. Her research project involved locating the area of the chromosome where the "touch" genes reside in the Arabidopsis thaliana plant using the Southern Blot Method of radiolabeling. She spent the summer of 1996 cloning the Arabidopsis thaliana plant protein ILL3 into an E. Coli vector and expressing the plant proteins ILL1, ILL2, and ILL3 in E. Coli. As an undergraduate at Schreiner College in Texas, Rosie was the recipient of numerous academic scholarships, fellowships, and honors.

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Hector Tello
Houston, TX
In 1992, Hector worked on two projects in association with NASA's Johnson Space Center, identifying the effects of ultraviolet radiation on thermal control coatings and developing lightweight, high-strength composite materials to replace the materials currently used on the astronauts' extravehicular mobility unit. These materials are critical to the design of a suit to be used on a return to the moon or on missions to Mars. Outside his academic pursuits, Hector is interested in meeting with the other participants to discuss their views on minority opportunities in science and he hopes to serve as a role model for younger participants. His achievements include membership in the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and several papers on aluminum-silicon carbide composites for aerospace applications and contamination control of low-earth-orbit spacecraft. Hector received a Ph.D. in material science in May 1994 from Rice University.

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Carlos Uribe
Houston, TX
Carlos graduated from the University of Houston (Downtown) in May of 1996 with a B.S. in computer science. In the summer of 1995 he worked with Doug Moore, learning various ways to create, display and manipulate BeziŹr curves and NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines). At present, BeziŹr curves and NURBS are finding many applications in the computer-simulation of rounded objects, such as bones or cells. Carlos enjoyed the program and working with Moore so much that he decided to attend graduate school at Rice University and returned to work with his mentor during the summer of 1996 to study the computer analysis of electromyographic. This study is useful in confirming and diagnosing muscle disease. Carlos has also developed a graphical user interface for the "Interactive Linear Algebra Text" application.

His research papers include:

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Leticia Velazquez
El Paso, TX
Leticia is a student of computational and applied mathematics and is pursuing a Ph.D. at Rice University. She has spent three consecutive summers in the SaS program. Most recently, she worked with Tapia on using Interior Point Methods to solve the Phase problem in Crystallography. In 1995, her project focused on using the Interior Point Method to calculate electron density functions where the phase is unknown, in order to determine the molecular structure of proteins. Her mentors in 1995 were Tapia and El-Bakry. In 1994, she spent the summer working with Tapia exploring several areas of interest that included numerical analysis, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and computational science. Her academic accomplishments include:

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Maria Villalobos
Donna, TX
Maria is interested in K-12 mathematics education, so she spent the summer of 1993 working with Anne Papakonstantinou, coordinator of the Rice University School Mathematics Project. Project members work with K-12 teachers from the Houston Independent School District, introducing them to new methods and techniques in mathematics education. As a research assistant, Maria read participants' daily journals and noted both positive and negative comments about lectures, homework, and group interactions. She also has participated directly in classroom activities in order to gain firsthand knowledge of the program. In May 1994, Maria received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. In the same year she began working towards a Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics, with a focus on nonlinear optimization. She is currently working with Tapia in examining and adjusting the centrality condition on a linear programming interior-point solver named LIPSOL. Her research should bring insight on the significance of having a centrality condition in LIPSOL and the role played by this condition in other numerical codes. In May of 1996 she was invited to speak at a minority organization at the University of Texas.

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Paulette Vines
Camp Hill, AL
In 1992, Paulette studied fractional ARIMA models using the ITSM computer package. She compared ARMA models with fractional ARIMA models. In 1990, Paulette analyzed water flow data recorded at Sims Bayou in Houston, TX to determine whether the bayou was in continuous flow. Additionally, in 1991, she analyzed ozone data collected by the Texas Air Control Board. This was instrumental in determining which areas of Houston were potentially hazardous in ozone concentration. Paulette has written a paper on this study that was submitted to the Stats journal. She received a B.A. in statistics from Rice University in May 1992 and is currently attending graduate school at North Carolina State University.

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Donald Williams
Dallas, TX
Donald is currently working on a Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University. In the summer of 1995, he worked with Joel Bennett of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Tapia on simulating and controlling dynamical systems governed by Lagrangian equations of motion, where the rotational components of motion within the governing differential equations are described by four-space Euler parameters. He took part in the SaS program again in 1996, working this time with Steve Cox and Tapia. His research consisted of developing algorithms to compute the numerical solutions of extremal eigenvalue problems for two-phase conductors in two and three spacial dimensions. He is a member of both the Tau Beta Pi and the Eta Kappa Nu honors societies.

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Jerome Williams
Foremon, AR
A junior majoring in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, Jerome worked in 1991 with Don Johnson of the Rice Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to construct a computer simulation of a neuron in the auditory system of a cat. To accomplish this, he used GENESIS, a new simulation program designed at Caltech. Jerome learned firsthand about the opportunities available to minority students in performing research and attending graduate school.

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Pamela Joy Williams
Hopkinsville, KY
Pamela conducted computational science research in 1992 under the guidance of El-Bakry and Tapia. She is a distinguished scholar who has been accepted into Phi Beta Kappa, Pi Mu Epsilon, and Omicron Delta Kappa. She has also received fellowships from the AT&T Cooperative Research Program and the National Society of Black Engineers. She participated in the SaS program in order to gain more research experience in the area of optimization. Pamela's project involved the implementation of primal-dual interior point algorithms for linear programming in computers. In January 1993, she gave a presentation at the Joint Mathematics Meetings of the Mathematics Association of America. In the summer of 1994, she worked with Tapia again, studying constrained optimization. In the summers of 1995 and 1996 she worked on developing finite termination techniques in interior-point methods for solving linear programming problems, again under the mentorship of Tapia. Pamela is a Ph.D. candidate in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

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Felicia Diann Woodard
Houston, TX
Felicia feels that the SaS program sparked her interest in graduate school, because until she participated in the program, she had never realized how interesting academic research could be. This past summer, she worked with Tony Kearsley of the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department on a program that solves isotonic regression. They wrote versions for sequential and parallel machines. Felicia spent the summer of 1992 working with Castellanos, writing a C program to help high school students understand electronic circuitry problems, such as those involving Ohm's Law, capacitance, inductance, and others. Among her many achievements, she has been on the Dean's List and is a member of Banneker Honors College, Epsilon Pi Tau, and Gamma Sigma Sigma. Felicia received a B.S. in computer engineering from Prairie View A&M University in the fall of 1994. Felicia's goal after graduation is to be a professional software program writer.

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James Wooten
Houston, TX
James is a graduate student at Rice University working on an M.S. in astronomy. He spent the summer of 1994 in the SaS program under the mentorship of Robert Haymes, working on a project that began earlier in the year, designing a coded aperture mask for Prometheus I (a gamma ray telescope) that enables the telescope to record MeV images.

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Elizabeth Zertuche
Donna, TX
Elizabeth participated in the SaS program in 1991, working with Don Johnson of the Rice Electrical and Computer Engineering Department on NEURON, a computer simulation program that models a simple nerve cell. As a result of her work on this project, Johnson presented her contribution at a scientific conference. Elizabeth's project for 1992 involved working with Johnson and Cheiko Tuschitani from the University of Texas Health Science Center using GENESIS, a neuron modeling program, to run physiologically correct simulations of brain functions using raw data from cats. The researchers were trying to see if GENESIS is the appropriate tool to use for this proposed project and, if so, whether or not the program needed to have additional implementations. Elizabeth plans to attend graduate school and feels that this program has provided her with good experience in learning about a careers in scientific research. Elizabeth received a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University in May 1994.

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Erica Zimmer
Houston, TX
Erica began the graduate program at Rice University in 1994. She participated in the 1996 SaS program under the direction of John Dennis. Her research project consisted of finding the minimum cost for a water treatment plant. Solving this problem involved minimizing the nonlinear functions of operating cost and capital cost, while incorporating the nonlinear constraints of the plant.

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