Vanessa
Valdez, Social Justice Academy and Upward Bound
Biosketches: Moderators
Kenneth Elmore
holds a Master's degree from Boston University (SED '87),
is a graduate of Brown University and the
New England School of Law and has practiced law as an attorney at a
Boston law firm before returning to the University in 2003.
The dean of students is responsible for overseeing
more than 350 student organizations and directing the
student services and programs of such departments
as the Office of Residence Life, the Office of Career
Services, the George Sherman Union, Orientation and
Off-Campus Services, Judicial Affairs, Multicultural
Affairs, and the Community Service Center.
Terrence R. Blackman
is an Instructor in the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College. He
has taught Mathematics within the City University of New York in s ome
capacity since 1990. He started as a tutor in the Math Workshop at
Kingsborough Community College and as the MATHEMATICA Assistant to an
experimental calculus class at Brooklyn College in 1990. After his graduation
from Brooklyn College in 1991, he w orked as a Stock Broker on Wall
Street. His life changed in the summer of 1992 when h e accepted an
invitation from one of his undergraduate mentors Dr. Susan Hom, to work in
the Family College at Kingsborough Community College. His task was to prepare
sin gle mothers on public assistance to take the CUNY Math Placement
Exam. One mother in the class did not pass the exam that summer. Her failure,
the challenges that she and the other mothers presented as a students, and
her heartfelt lament "Why do I need this Mathematics now? Can I really do
this?" have in large measure defined the person al, political and
professional choices of his adult life. In September of 1992 he enrolled in
the Doctoral Program in Mathematics at the City U niversity Graduate School
on the advice of Lisa Goldberg, his undergraduate mentor in mathematics. In
September of 1993, was awarded a Graduate Teaching Fellowship at Med gar
Evers College and he has been there continuously in some capacity since
then. Dur ing his tenure there, in addition to being a Lecturer in the
Department of Mathematic s, he has taught in the REACH program at MEC, and he
has spent many enjoyable summers and winters teaching mathematics for The
Freshman Year Program. He received his M. P hil, from The Graduate School,
CUNY in May of 2000. In the summer of 2000, he visited the Harish Chandra
Research Institute in Allahabad India. While there he worked on A rithmetic
Fuchsian Groups with his mentor Ravi Kulkarni. On his return from India, in
the Fall of 2000 he was appointed Mathematics Instructor at Medgar Evers
College. Du ring the 90s he also worked as an Adjunct Lecturer in the
Department of Mathematics a t John Jay College and at Lehman College in the
City University of New York. Over the course of these postings he has taught,
with success, most of the courses th at span the undergraduate mathematics
curriculum. His record indicates a long history of successfully teaching
mathematics at the undergraduate level and, in particular, a sustained and
serious commitment to grappling with the challenges of teaching minor ities
in urban environments. He has spoken publicly and has worked assiduously on
iss ues related to minority success in mathematics. His current research
interests begin with Nielsen Kernels of Riemann Surfaces and extends to the
pedagogical issues that surround the teaching of mathematics in urban
environments. He is also actively inter ested in the challenges of
integrating technology in the Mathematics curriculum withi n these
environments. Terrence lives in the Canarsie area of Brooklyn with his son
Madiba, a fifth grader, at Phyls Academy.
Biosketches: Panelists
John M. Belcher.
Pierre-Richard Jean Cornely.
Pierre-Richard Cornely received the BS-MSc degree, in Electrical
Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts in 1989, and
the MSc and Ph.D., degrees, from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell,
Massachusetts, in Electrical Engineering in 1996 and 1999. Dr. Cornely's
contribution to scientific research includes but is not limited to: signal
and image processing applied to medical diagnostic and prevention of chronic
diseases such as black lung, and breast cancer; ionospheric physics and
modeling applied to radio, and radar signal propagation, and signal
fidelity; Genetic Algorithms applied to artificial adaptation, machine
learning and robotics. Since March of 2003, Dr. Cornely has been working as
a Senior Research Scientist at the Raytheon Company. His contribution
include: Research and Development, modeling, simulation and performance
analysis of the best radar systems in the world. In July 2006, Dr. Cornely
created the
Institute For Advanced Mind Studies (IFAMS) whose purpose is to teach the
common
individual about the intricacies and subtleties of the subconscious mind. The
Institute is
actively offering courses and seminars on various related subjects in the
greater Boston
area and around the world.
Roscoe C. Giles.
Highlights from
NCSA News:
Roscoe C. Giles,
deputy director of Boston University's Center for
Computational Science and a professor of computer and electrical engineering
in the university's College of Engineering [and co-chair of
Education, Outreach and Training Partnership
for Advanced Computational Infrastracture EOT-PACI], has
been named one of the "50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science" in
2004. The award from the Maryland-based publishing company, Career
Communications Group, Inc. (CCG), was be conferred during the Emerald Honors
Conference for Research Science, in Nashville, Tenn., September 17.
Roscoe Giles has been selected to receive the 2000 A. Nico Habermann Award
of the Computing Research Association.
Dr. Giles is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University.
For the past 25 years, Dr. Giles has worked at MIT and Boston University to increase the participation of underrepresented minorities in the computing disciplines. He has served as a faculty advisor and mentor for the Minority Engineers Society at Boston University, an affiliate of the National Society of Black Engineers. Dr. Giles has mentored high school, undergraduate, and graduate students in New England for the New England Board of Higher Education.
Because of his strong commitment to education, combined with his energy and dedication to diversifying the population of CSE students and faculty nationwide, Dr. Giles was named one of three co-chairs of the Education, Outreach, and Training (EOT) program for the NSF Partnerships in Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI). This program focuses on improving the computational component of K-12 education, developing K-12 computing curricula that appeal to girls and underrepresented minorities, and increasing the involvement of institutions that serve minorities in PACI.
Roscoe Giles helped to organize an NSF workshop on "Increasing Participation of Minorities in the Computing Disciplines" that led to the formation of the Coalition to Diversify Computing. He also works actively with the NSF EDUCAUSE/EOT-PACI project, Advanced Networking with Minority Serving Institutions (AN-MSI). This project assists colleges and universities that traditionally serve African-American, Hispanic, and Tribal communities in the development of the infrastructure and skills needed to take advantage of advanced computational tools and resources, such as the technology Grid being prototyped by the PACI program. The Grid will connect people, supercomputers, virtual environments, scientific instruments, educational tools, and large data sets through a seamless, integrated, persistent environment operating over high-speed networks.
Dr. Giles co-chaired the Education Program for the SC97 conference, benefiting a large group of diverse teachers and exposing thousands of SC97 conference attendees to the K-12 use of technology. He will serve as general chair for SC2002.
Donald R. King.
Featured in
Mathematicians
of the African Diaspora, Professor King earned his Ph.D. at MIT,
Dissertation: The Primitive Ideals Associated to Harish Chandra Modules and
Certain Harmonic Polynomials, Advisor: Bertram Kostant.
His areas of interest include:
Nilpotents in semisimple Lie algebras, unitary representations of reductive
groups, Symplectic geometry of coadjoint orbits, Enveloping algebras and
quantum groups, and K-12 mathematics instruction and assessment.
Rajini Jesudason
Raj Jesudason is a Program Director in Mathematics at the Woodrow Wilson
Middle School. Raj has also worked with teachers and students in the Boston,
Cambridge and Watertown Public School districts, and has helped to implement
initiatives in asset-based instruction and teacher development in mathematics
education. Raj's experience in higher education includes serving as a Dean
of Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering at a community college in
California, teaching Quantitative Reasoning and Pre-Calculus mathematics at
Harvard University, implementing a Quantitative Reasoning Program at Wellesley
College, and teaching courses in the teacher education programs at both UMass
Boston and Wheelock Colleges.
Raj has presented her work on transcending the Achievement Gap and the
integration of mathematics across disciplines, at regional conferences,
including Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Black Policy conference,
as
well as the Southern California Community College Consortium, MathWest
conference in Massachusetts, and Quantitative Literacy Consortium of the
Northwest.
Raj has an Ed. M. from Harvard University Graduate School of Education,
Diploma
in Secondary Education in Mathematics from McGill University and a Bachelor of
Mathematics degree from Dalhousie University in Canada. Raj has lived and
worked abroad in Africa (lived in Nigeria and Zanzibar), Asia and North
America
and is interested in tying quality research to the practice of those in the
field and community.
Alfred
Gérard Noël
My formal education terminated in 1997 with a Ph. D. in Pure Mathematics
under the supervision of the African-American mathematician Donald R.
King from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Aside from
visiting positions of various lengths at Harvard, MIT and the Université
de Poitiers (France), I have been on the Mathematics faculty of the
University of Massachusetts in Boston since 1998. I am currently an
associate Professor at UmassBoston and a Visiting Scholar at MIT.
My field of research is Representation Theory of Lie groups, a
fundamental branch of Mathematics with deep connections to Physics and
Number Theory.
Before joining UmassBoston, I taught Mathematics and Computer Science
for fourteen years at Northeastern University. I also worked for nine
years as a software/research engineer in industry.
In 2006 I became a member of the Atlas of Lie Groups and
Representations project, focusing on computational techniques for
determining the unitary dual of real Lie groups. This is the
international group of 19 mathematicians that
announced the computation
of the Kazhdan-Lusztig-Vogan polynomials for the split form of E8 on
March 19, 2007.
Since 1996, I have organized the
Haitian Scientific Society seminars and
served as webmaster.
Vanessa Valdez.
Excerpt from BU Today March 8, 2007, University Headlines:
For the past three years, Valdez, who attends the Social Justice Academy in
Boston, has participated in
Upward Bound at BU, a federally funded college
preparatory program for potential first-generation college and low-income
Boston public high school students. Recently, she received a four-year,
full-tuition scholarship through the Posse Foundation.
A national organization that helps urban high school students gain admission
to college, the Posse Foundation in January awarded 61 scholarships to
students Boston-area four of whom are in Upward Bound. Valdez was selected
from more than 1,100 applicants.
Valdez will attend Centre College in Danville, Ky., which has approximately
1,200 students. She is considering math as her major.