First meeting of the professional development seminar this semester. We'll start by discussing possible topics; please bring along ideas and suggestions. Also, we'll try to get a headcount for our weekly pizza order.

After that, the topic is going to be, "What do you do after you get a job offer?"

Teaching is an important aspect of a career in academia. Tony Phillips -- whom many of you probably got to know during the teaching practicum -- has agreed to share some of his experience and advice with us in the seminar. (Pizza will be served at the beginning of the seminar.)

We will discuss ideas for developing as a teacher and for documenting your successes as a teacher. Please feel free to bring any questions about teaching or the academic job search. (Pizza, as usual.)

No seminar due to President Stanley's visit.

I’ll discuss various issues involved in publishing math papers, including some thoughts about what happens behind the scenes when you submit a paper to a journal. I'll also share some reminisences of how the system worked in "the good old days."

Today's technological world is increasingly dependent upon the reliability, robustness, quality of service and timeliness of networks including those of power distribution, financial, transportation, communication, biological, and social. For the time-critical functionality in transferring resources and information, a key requirement is the ability to adapt and reconfigure in response to structural and dynamic changes, while avoiding disruption of service and catastrophic failures. We will outline some of the major problems for the development of the necessary theory and tools that will permit the understanding of network dynamics in a multiscale manner.

Many interesting networks consist of a finite but very large number of nodes or agents that interact with each other. The main challenge when dealing with such networks is to understand and regulate the collective behavior. Our goal is to develop mathematical models and optimization tools for treating the Big Data nature of large scale networks while providing the means to understand and regulate the collective behavior and the dynamical interactions (short and long-range) across such networks.

The key mathematical technique will be based upon the use optimal mass transport theory and resulting notions of curvature applied to weighted graphs in order to characterize network robustness. Examples will be given from biology, finance, and transportation.

Chris and Raanan are going to share some advice on the job market, journal publications, research, postdoc jobs, etc. from the point of view of someone working in analysis. (Pizza will be served.)

Corey Hoelscher has a Ph.D. in Riemannian geometry from the University of Pennsylvania, and now works at the fixed income division of Morgan Stanley. He is going to discuss quantitative careers in finance and share his experiences transitioning from math academia into finance.

There are many events for mathematicians, such as conferences, workshops, summer schools, etc. We'll talk about some basic questions, such as: How do you figure out which events to go to? How do you get funding? How much travel is good, how much is too much? (With pizza, as always.)

Jennifer got her PhD at Stony Brook in 1998 (with Dusa McDuff), and after being at the NSF for several years, is now the director of the AAAS Science and Technology Fellowship program. She will talk briefly about her career path from academia to the government and non-profit sectors, and about the common thread of teasing out the important structural details in complex situations, and then answer questions.

Jennifer is also doing a campus-wide information session about the Science and Technology Fellowship program (Wang Center, Lecture Hall 1, 3pm), in case you are interested.

In view of the upcoming graduate student recitals, we are going to look at some advice for giving good short talks.

Useful references:

"Technically Speaking", http://techspeaking.denison.edu/
(a collection of short videos about communication skills)

"How to give a good 20-minute math talk" by William Ross
(https://blog.richmond.edu/wross/2008/03/26/how-to-give-a-good-20-minute-math-talk/)