Harvey Mudd College

NSF Awards · FY 2026 · 2026-08

African trypanosomes are parasites transmitted to the bloodstream of humans and cattle via the bite of the tsetse fly. Infected humans and animals develop African trypanosomiasis, a disease that is fatal if untreated. The parasites cover themselves with different surface proteins depending on whether they are in the mammal or the fly, and these surface proteins are key to the survival of the parasite in both organisms. The scientific goal of this project is to understand the molecular mechanism that allows the parasite to change its surface proteins when it travels from the mammalian bloodstream to the gut of the fly following a bloodmeal. Understanding this mechanism will help shed light on how parasites evolved to adapt to different environments and could inform strategies to generate alternate therapies for the disease. The educational goal of the project is to allow full participation of 3 high school students and 10-12 undergraduates in cutting-edge research to help prepare them for careers in academia and biotechnology industries. Undergraduates participating in the program will attend lectures, career panels, and networking events with leaders in the biotechnology industry to expose them to exciting applications of biotechnology and help prepare them for careers in these fields. Rigorous research training at the high school and undergraduate level will create the foundation for these students to become leaders in industries that improve the health of the American public. The African trypanosome, Trypanosoma brucei, undergoes morphological and metabolic adaptation as it switches hosts. During transition from the mammalian bloodstream to the fly midgut, parasites remodel their cell surface, switching from a thick protein coat of antigenically variable variant surface glycoprotein (VSG) to an invariant procyclin coat in the fly midgut. While the environmental cues that trigger surface protein remodeling have been identified, little is known about the genetic mechanism that regulates initiation of transcription for the GPEET and EP genes that code for the invariant insect-stage procyclin protein. Our lab has shown that the histone acetyl lysine binding bromodomain protein Bdf3 localizes to the EP promoter after parasites are triggered to differentiate from the bloodstream to the insect stage. Bdf3 is thought to bind the H4K10ac mark made by the histone acetyltransferase HAT2. We hypothesize that changes in histone acetylation at the EP locus by the histone acetyl transferase HAT2 drives recruitment of Bdf3, which facilitates initiation of EP transcription and surface protein remodeling at differentiation. We will test this hypothesis by (1) using a dCas9-Bdf3 CRISPR activation system to ask whether Bdf3 recruitment is sufficient to initiate EP transcription in the absence of environmental cues, and (2) characterizing the histone acetylation state and Bdf3 occupancy at the EP locus in the presence or absence of HAT2. (3) We will also knock down 3 bromodomain protein complex members using RNAi and test their importance in regulating the EP locus. These studies will shed light on the role for the ‘primitive’ histone code in early branching eukaryotes and the regulation of transcription in biologically diverse systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2026 · 2026-07

This award supports U.S.-based participants at the “Escuela Costarricense de Combinatoria (Combinatorial School of Combinatorics)”, held from July 27 to August 07, 2026, at the Universidad de Costa Rica. Drawing inspiration from the influential Encuentro Colombiano de Combinatoria, this research school aims to strengthen the ties between mathematical communities across the Americas and cultivate a collaborative environment for researchers at all career stages. The program features four intensive minicourses led by experts in graph theory, matroid theory, polyhedral geometry, and symmetric functions. In addition to these courses, the school includes plenary talks, contributed sessions, and a poster session designed to highlight the role of combinatorics as a bridge between algebra and discrete geometry. The 2026 program will include lectures by the following researchers: Federico Ardila, Anastasia Chavez, Emily Heath, and Rosa Orellana. To enhance the training of the next generation of mathematicians, the school also incorporates SageMath computational tutorials and dedicated exercise sessions led by graduate and postdoctoral teaching assistants. These activities are designed to foster international partnerships and provide early-career researchers with the tools and networks necessary for professional success in the global mathematical community. More information regarding the school and its academic outputs will be made available on the official event website: https://escuela.cimpa.ucr.ac.cr. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2026 · 2026-01

Geometric combinatorics deals with the study of geometric objects through their combinatorial structure. Some geometric objects that are of interest are known as polytopes. H.S.M. Coxeter wrote that “a polytope is a geometrical figure bounded by portions of lines, planes, or hyperplanes; e.g., in two dimensions it is a polygon, in three a polyhedron”. Arguably, the foundations for the study of polytopes were laid by the Greeks over two millennia ago, as many can recall their study of what are regarded as Platonic solids. In the 1700’s the study of polytopes heightened with Leonhard Euler’s polyhedral formula, which gave birth to the enumerative geometric combinatorics on the number of faces of polytopes. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, Georg Pick discovered a formula, which calculates the area of a lattice polygon using only its discrete information; this started the study of lattice point enumeration of polytopes. In the 1960s, in an attempt to generalize Pick’s formula to higher dimensions, Eugene Ehrhart started the study of counting the numbers of lattice points in dilations of polytopes, which established Ehrhart theory. Studying a combinatorial object’s associated polytope often reveals intriguing geometric results about the polytope, but the results’ implications about the original combinatorial object (and related objects) is not always well understood. The PI will focus on how geometric results about a polytope can provide information about the original combinatorial object. Throughout the course of this project, the PI will actively involve undergraduate students in the research process. Key initiatives include supporting the Summer@Mudd research program at Harvey Mudd College and establishing the Mathematical Connections Seminar to further engage students in mathematical exploration. This project seeks to derive combinatorial results from geometry and use combinatorics to guide the geometry. The focus is on the geometry and Ehrhart theory of polytopes, particularly the challenge of computing their volume. One approach is to obtain the discrete volume (the Ehrhart polynomial/function), from which the continuous volume can be recovered. In this way, Ehrhart theory serves as a discrete version of integration, measuring a polytope through lattice-point enumeration. This project is centered around the relationship between three fundamental objects in combinatorics and discrete geometry: parking functions, posets, and polytopes. Generalizations of parking functions have been studied from an enumerative perspective by many mathematicians; the PI will work to further solidify the connection between generalized parking functions and polytopes. The PI will also explore the interplay between posets and polytopes, through the valuation polytope. The valuation polytope has not been studied as extensively as other poset polytopes, such as the chain or order polytopes. It has been asked whether the coefficients of the Ehrhart polynomial of valuation polytopes are nonnegative. This question serves as the primary motivation for the PI to undertake a comprehensive study of valuation polytopes. The PI will employ methods from algebraic and geometric combinatorics, polyhedral geometry, and computational experimentation to extend the knowledge of the geometry and Ehrhart theory of combinatorially-defined polytopes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-09

The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) is a mentoring event hosted at the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH). SPLASH is a premier venue in programming languages and software engineering (PL/SE) research which focuses on all aspects of software construction and delivery. PLMW provides early-career researchers, such as undergraduate students, Masters students, and early PhD students, the opportunity to learn about PL/SE research, develop skills towards navigating the practical elements of graduate school and career finding, and start developing meaningful connections with the research community at large. Support through this grant facilitates the free exchange of technical information and the development of an engaged, global research community by facilitating the in-person presence of US-based students. This grant provides travel and conference registration support for US-based students to attend the mentoring workshop and conference from 2025 to 2027 in three different regions of the world: Singapore, the United States, and Europe. Priority for funding will be given to students who are first-time conference attendees and demonstrate strong interest in pursuing PL/SE research careers. PLMW expects to support 20 students through this grant. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-09

In this project, funded by the MPS-LEAPS (Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways) Program and managed by the Division of Chemistry, Professor Ogba and his students at Harvey Mudd College will perform computational mechanistic studies that support the development of organocatalysts, specifically carbones, for use in efficient chemical reactions. Catalysis plays a vital role in the chemical industry, significantly facilitating the production of various manufactured goods. However, many conventional catalytic processes rely on metal-based systems, which can be costly and have detrimental environmental impact. Professor Ogba and his students will utilize molecular modeling, cheminformatics, and machine learning to investigate the structure-function relationships of carbones, a unique class of reactive carbon species, which could serve as potential metal-free catalysts. Their study aims not only to deepen the understanding of carbone reactivity but also to develop publicly accessible reactivity databases for carbones and machine learning programs that facilitate the use of these species in reaction design. Additionally, they will support the development and retention of all first-year STEM students by providing structured research rotations and community-building activities during their first semester. Key aims of the proposed work include the development and use of cheminformatics techniques to automate the computation of structural and electronic descriptors of over 80 synthesized carbones using density functional theory (DFT) methods. This will involve rigorous conformational searches and DFT calculations to identify critical molecular descriptors of carbones that affect catalytic performance. Furthermore, the project will quantify the kinetic hydricities of pinacolborane-bound carbones through energy barrier calculations, establishing a nucleophilicity index for these species. By employing supervised machine learning techniques, Professor Ogba and his students will predict kinetic hydricities based on derived molecular descriptors. This hypothesis-driven and machine learning approach will facilitate a deeper understanding of the fundamental chemical principles governing carbones as hydride-donor catalysts. The project also includes creating publicly-accessible databases of steric parameters and nucleophilicity indexes for carbones, alongside a machine-learning program that predicts the reactivity of carbones. These resources will allow scientists to design novel carbone architectures and explore their reactivity. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-09

The National STEM Teacher Corps Pilot Program Regional Alliance for Mathematics Teacher Development, Uplift, and Professionalization in Los Angeles (RAMPTD-UP-LA) project aims to recognize outstanding STEM educators who advance educational excellence in the West Region. This project will support 30 grade 4–12 math teachers in the greater Los Angeles area in two cohorts. The goals of this program are to (1) heighten STEM learning experiences for all students, (2) promote the retention of excellent STEM teachers, (3) elevate the STEM teaching profession, and (4) develop teacher leaders. Teachers must apply to this proposed program in pairs or groups from the same school site with some initial ideas for how they want to improve student outcomes at their school. If one teacher reaches 120 students a year, these 30 Corps Members can directly reach roughly 14,400 students during four years of support. Furthermore, STEM Teacher Corps Members will mentor other teachers, promote changes in their schools and districts that broaden access to high-quality math education for all students, and disseminate their efforts regionally and nationally, leading to improvements in math education beyond their own classrooms. To help teachers grow and carry out these proposed improvements, the program will provide STEM Teacher Corps Members with an annual stipend, time for teachers to collaborate, on-site coaching, funding for supplies and travel to conferences, support to become National Board Certified, PD through monthly meetings and a summer institute, and mechanisms to help the teachers share their work with their colleagues. This comprehensive support structure was devised to help counteract the challenges of teaching math in the Los Angeles area. The program will be supported by a robust evaluation plan that will allow project leadership to monitor the impact of the program on participating teachers (including on their retention in the teaching profession after their participation has ended) and to continually improve the program to best meet teachers' needs. Student achievement measures will also be analyzed. This Regional Alliance project is supported through the National STEM Teacher Corps Pilot Program. The NSF National STEM Teacher Corps Pilot Program supports outstanding STEM educators in high-need schools that advance educational excellence in our Nation's preK-12 classrooms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-08

The scientific goal of this CAREER project is to develop theoretically-founded, randomized iterative methods for problems common in numerical linear algebra (NLA) and optimization, and extend their application and analysis to face a new and important set of challenges. The incredible growth in size and complexity of data sets commonly analyzed has made it imperative to have randomized computational techniques that are robust to adversarial error, incorporate or are adaptable to natural problem constraints, and can be applied in settings in which both the number and dimension of data are massive. This project additionally provides opportunities for students to engage in cutting-edge research, and supports creation of materials for an advanced undergraduate-level modern numerical linear algebra course to be used at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) and beyond. This course will feature significant curricular research projects which align with the technical directions identified in this project; descriptions of potential course project topics will be released with the public course materials. The project will additionally provide vertically-integrated mentorship opportunities for visiting graduate students, HMC undergraduates, and high school students through HMC’s federally funded Upward Bound (UB) program. Finally, the project will support an annual professional development workshop for early career participants interested in research mentorship at primarily undergraduate institutions. The intellectual merit of this CAREER project is the development and analysis of a suite of randomized iterative methods for problems with devastating adversarial corruption, problem constraints, and extremely large data dimension. The project will focus specifically on three main research thrusts: (1) Developing and analyzing corruption-robust variants of randomized iterative methods in numerical linear algebra for least-squares regression, and generalizing these analyses to first-order methods in numerical optimization for a more general class of convex optimization problems. (2) Analyzing the iterative behavior of common combinatorial and numerical iterative methods for randomly sketched and subsampled regression problems with nonnegative and related constraints, and using these analyses to develop efficient randomized iterative methods for such problems. (3) Extending the application of randomized iterative methods to problems in which both the number and size of data may be massive by developing provably effective randomly compressed and sparsified iterative updates. Open-source software implementations of the developed and analyzed methods will accompany the work completed under each of the above thrusts. Additionally, this work will be distributed both in formal peer-reviewed journal and conference submissions, and in educational resources for students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-07

Estuaries support unique ecosystems and provide valuable economic benefits, such as aquaculture farms and recreation. They require careful management in the face of a changing climate and increasing coastal development. Estuaries with low river inflow for part of the year, found for example in California, Texas, and Latin America, are particularly vulnerable to depletion of freshwater resources and increasing drought conditions. However, predicting the response of a low-inflow estuary to these new conditions is challenging. This challenge arises in part because low-inflow estuaries behave differently than traditional estuaries which have year-round river flow. Most theory for estuary circulation focuses on traditional estuaries and does not apply well to low-inflow estuaries. Our project aims to fill this knowledge gap by testing how low-inflow estuaries respond to extreme weather and drought. The project results will generate a new understanding of the circulation of low-inflow estuaries. It will also help inform coastal managers on how low-inflow estuaries are likely to respond to future variability. The research will be paired with an educational component including school labs and field trips to promote ocean science among students. The proposed project aims to enhance knowledge of future changes to low-inflow estuaries using models. For high-inflow systems, idealized modeling studies have investigated the estuarine adjustment to changes in river runoff or tidal forcing. However, analogous studies for low-inflow estuaries are lacking, despite the global prevalence of low-inflow systems. This research will develop numerical simulations of low-inflow estuaries using the hydrodynamical model ROMS (Regional Ocean Modeling System). The primary goal of the simulations will be to evaluate the circulation response to strong surface thermodynamic forcing and periodic but intense freshwater pulses mimicking future climate variability. The experiments will also test the conditions necessary for the formation of mid-estuary density minima (thermal plugs) and maxima (salt plugs) features which can impact residence time and mixing. Both density-driven and tidally driven circulation regimes will be generated by varying factors such as estuary depth, tidal amplitude, and air temperature. Using a range of parameters will enable broad applicability of results. Passive dye experiments will also be run to quantify flushing timescales and their response to extreme weather. Therefore, in addition to providing a physical understanding of low-inflow estuaries, the results will have direct relevance to biological and chemical analysis of low-inflow estuary ecosystems. The proposed research will generate new ideas for understanding the physics of low-inflow estuaries, helping to build a contemporary framework. This framework can then form the basis of future interdisciplinary research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

The future engineering workforce demands professionals who, in addition to their technical skills, can evaluate and address the environmental, social, and ethical factors impacting their engineering decisions. In parallel, engineering faculty need pathways to meet emerging workforce needs in both their individual courses and across the engineering curriculum. This work will address these needs by designing, developing, implementing, and assessing a Systems Thinking Framework that undergraduate engineers can apply to coursework, projects, and professional practice. Systems Thinking considers a concept not as a discrete idea but as housed within a broader system, with dynamic and interconnected relationships between system components. Systems Thinking is inherently a sociotechnical approach to problem solving and can promote examining environmental, social, and ethical relationships. The Systems Thinking Framework will be deployed in 5-7 activities across courses in an interdisciplinary engineering curriculum and in an industry-partnered capstone design project. By consistently practicing evaluating the environmental and sociotechnical aspects of engineering design, students will be equipped to contribute this skill upon entering the workforce. To incorporate the Systems Thinking Framework, this project will deploy and evaluate a prototyping process for faculty enacting large-scale curricular change. This prototyping-based change process can further be applied to additional emerging workforce needs. This work is aligned with the NSF-Lemelson Initiative and Research in the Formation of Engineers program goals of effectively integrating environmental and social sustainability into engineering education and enhancing our understanding of curricular change. Implementation and assessment using student-produced deliverables, surveys, and interviews will answer research questions focused on (i) how students use Systems Thinking to evaluate environmental, social, and ethical implications, (ii) student growth over multiple Systems Thinking experiences, and (iii) comparisons between case-study and open-ended contexts. Expected measurable outcomes include that students will assess the environmental, social, and ethical implications of an engineering technology by defining and evaluating the system, and that students will use Systems Thinking to make design decisions that consider environmental, social, and ethical factors in addition to technical optimality. In parallel, this work will examine how a distributed, coordinated prototyping process can address faculty barriers and drivers towards addressing sustainability and social impacts in their courses. Assessment of the prototyping process through surveys and interviews will contribute to new understanding of faculty needs and effective strategies for large-scale curricular change. The expected measurable outcome for this work is that faculty will demonstrate increased self-efficacy toward instructing on sustainability and sociotechnical impacts. To support applicability and propagation, the Framework and modular course activities (Modules) will be co-created and implemented with faculty partners across institutions through prototyping Community of Practice groups. Graduate students and postdocs from around Southern California will also gain experience teaching Systems Thinking and using prototypes to explore new teaching practices through a summer teaching workshop. All Modules will be made publicly available with a Creative Commons license, including a “Module Skeleton” that can be adapted to new topics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.