Nine members of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) in Boston, Massachusetts during the first week of January.  JMM is an annual meeting of both the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS).  Over 7200 mathematicians, mostly from the USA, were in attendance this year.

During the conference, several Valpo faculty gave contributed or invited presentations:

• Alex Capaldi, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, presented “Using Infectious Disease Models in Calculus and Differential Equations Courses” in the MAA Session on Modeling Across the Mathematics Curriculum.
• Mindy Capaldi, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, presented “A Semi-IBL Finite Mathematics Class: is it possible and can it be successful?” in the MAA Session on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Collegiate Mathematics.  She also helped organize a panel on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for Project NExT, a professional development program for early-career mathematics faculty.
• Ken Luther, Associate Professor of Mathematics, presented “A Boundary Value Problem for a Doublet" in the MAA General Contributed Paper Session on Modeling and Applications of Mathematics.
• Daniel Maxin, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, presented “The logistic gender-structured model with ephemeral pair bonds and isolation from reproduction (report on an REU project at Valparaiso University)” in the MAA General Contributed Paper Session on Research in Applied Mathematics.
• Lara Pudwell, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, presented “Beautiful Bijections for Permutation Patterns” in the MAA Invited Paper Session on Clever Counting or Beautiful Bijection?
• Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo, Associate Professor of Mathematics, presented “ABACUS International Math Challenge” in the MAA General Contributed Paper Session on Assessment and Outreach.

In addition, faculty took part in the meetings of several national mathematics committees.  In particular:

• Melissa Desjarlais, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, attended the committee meeting for the AMC 8, a national middle school mathematics exam.
• Rick Gillman, Assistant Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Mathematics, attended the MAA executive committee meeting and the MAA Board of Governors meeting.  He also chaired the MAA Committee on Sections meeting, ran the MAA Section Officers meeting, attended the Council on Membership and Communities, and attended the Committee on Books meeting.
• Ken Luther participated in the Mathematics Across the Disciplines committee.
• Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo participated in the MAA Committee on Undergraduate Research.

Finally, several faculty provided support for undergraduate research students. 

• Alex Capaldi, Melissa Desjarlais, Rick Gillman, Lara Pudwell, and Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo attended a reunion dinner with past participants in the Valparaiso Experience in Research by Undergraduate Mathematicians program.
• Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo also helped recruit and organized over 200 judges for an undergraduate research poster session at the meetings.  Pat Sullivan and Alex Capaldi helped judge the posters.