SPEED Lab News

Graduate student position: I currently have a 2-year position open for a Master's student in my group. The student could work toward either an M.A. in Mathematics, or an M.S. in Ecology and Environmental Science. See the advertisement over on the Student positions page.
Nov 2008: UMaine Today magazine has done an article about me and my group which is available on their web page.
Fall 2008: I have received a 5-year $400,000 NSF CAREER award (DMS-0746603) for "Dynamics of Hierarchical Household-Structured Epidemiological Models", from Sept 1, 2008 through Aug 31, 2013. Here is UMaine's news release about it. More information to come soon...
Summer 2008: Isaac Michaud, Nick Millett, and Tyler Rigazio attended the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute (MTBI), a summer research program held at Arizona State University, run by Carlos Castillo-Chavez. I attended again as an instructor / research faculty / mentor.
Spring 2008: Thanks to the support from the National Science Foundation, I have begun including undergraduates studying Secondary Education and Mathematics (who are later planning to teach high-school math) in SPEED Lab activities. We have started to develop plans to reach out to area high schools, first via seminars presented at area high schools this spring, and hopefully via direct training activities with high school students beginning later on. There was a news release from the UMaine Dept of University Relations about this, on Apr 8, 2008.
Fall 2007: I have received a 3-year $180,000 NSF grant (DMS-0718786) supporting my research in "Spatial Population Models in Spatiotemporally Structured Environments", from Sept 1, 2007 through Aug 31, 2010. Thanks to the grant, Isaac Michaud and Nick Millett are helping to further explore the effects of various types of spatially and temporally clustered disturbances on locally-dispersing populations, while Ashley Coe is building a spatial model of invading Asian woodwasps (Sirex noctilio), in collaboration with Prof. Frank Drummond in the UMaine School of Biology and Ecology.
Summer 2007: Isaac Michaud, then a new member of the group, attended MTBI. Pam Reitsma attended for a second time, and I was there as research faculty / mentor.
Feb. 2007: Pam Reitsma gave a talk on "The dynamics of cigarette smoking among adolescents" at the Ninth Annual Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics, Feb 9-11, 2007.
Jan. 2007: David Gosselin graduated from the Honors College, his honors thesis was on ``Disease Spreading Across Social Networks.'' I was a committee member; Larry Latour in computer science was advisor. David is now working as a software engineer for BAE Systems in New Hampshire.
Jan. 2007: Amanda Criner (undergraduate research assistant) and I had a paper accepted for publication: D.E. Hiebeler and A.K. Criner, ``Partially mixed household epidemiological model with clustered resistant individuals,'' Physical Review E, 75, 022901 (2007).
Dec. 2006: The paper Ben Morin and I wrote based on his master's thesis has been accepted for publication: D.E. Hiebeler and B.R. Morin, ``The Effect of Static and Dynamic Spatially Structured Disturbances on a Locally Dispersing Population,'' Journal of Theoretical Biology, 246(1), 136--144 (2007).
Oct. 2006: Ben Morin wrote to mention the Eco-Informatics Summer Institute, a summer research and education program out in Oregon that senior undergrads and first-year graduate students may be interested in.
August 2006: I presented a poster titled "Household Epidemiological Models With Clustered Resistant Individuals" with Amanda Criner as co-author, at the Joint SIAM-SMB Conference on the Life Sciences in Raleigh, NC. It's based on ongoing work I'm doing in part with Amanda.
Summer 2006: I spent 5 weeks as a research advisor at MTBI. Jen Houle, Ben Morin, and Pam Reitsma also participated in MTBI for the full 2 months.
- Pam's project group (consisting of herself, Ludguier D. Montejo, Leonard Gordon, Odalys Colon-Rentas, Fabio Sanchez, and Baojun Song) won an undergraduate research presentation award (sponsored by SMB and RTI) for their talk on "The Impact of the Sleeper Effect and Relapse on the Dynamics of Cigarette Smoking Among Adolescents" at the Joint SIAM-SMB Conference on the Life Sciences (faculty advisors on the project were Baojun Song, Fabio Sanchez, and Carlos Castillo-Chavez).
- I was among the advisors on two other projects: "An Epidemiological Approach to the Dynamics of Chytridiomycosis on a Harlequin Frog Population" by Mario Ayala-Valenzuela, Casandra Pawling, Adrian Smith, Linda Gao, David Hiebeler, and Benjamin Morin; and "A Theoretical Framework for a Three-state Spatial Population Model with Applications", by Michelle Bettelheim, Jennifer Houle, Fabian Librado, David Hiebeler, and Karen Rios-Soto.
May 2006: Jen Houle graduated with highest honors from the UMaine Honors College. Her honors thesis, which I advised, was on "A spatial population model on a dynamic heterogeneous landscape". In Fall 2006 Jen began graduate school at the University of Limerick in Ireland for a master's degree in Music Technology.
May 2006: Ben Morin finished his M.A. with me, on "The effect of static and dynamic spatially structured disturbances on a locally dispersing population model". In Fall 2006 Ben moved to Oregon State University to work on a PhD in math, via the Ecosystem Informatics IGERT.
Feb 2006: Jen Houle gave a talk on "A spatial population model on a dynamic heterogenous landscape" at the Eighth Annual Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics, Feb 3-5, 2006; Pam Reitsma also attended the conference.
Summer 2005: Amanda Criner and Ben Morin both participated in MTBI, when it was held at Los Alamos National Lab.
Feb 2005: Amanda Criner gave a talk about our epidemiological models at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics, Feb 4-6, 2005.