IMPACT

Peter Banwarth (M.S. ’12) is an epidemiologist and public health data scientist with the Benton County Health Department in Oregon. He has developed models to guide county health policies on testing, safety and health measures for employees and the public to minimize infections and deaths in Corvallis and nearby areas.

Professor of mathematics Holly Swisher was awarded a NSF grant to investigate a number of problems that relate to modular and automorphic forms, which have played a central role in many major problems in number theory over the last century.

The McGraths put their knowledge of numbers to use and leveraged a qualified charitable distribution (QCD) to make a major gift to their alma mater while realizing a significant tax benefit.

“The QCD is the Holy Grail of donating,” Sue said. “Many of our friends didn’t know about it until we described it to them..."

The College of Science will graduate 670 undergraduate students with baccalaureate degrees in 2020-21, including 68 Honors graduates.

Jennifer Smucker, mathematics senior, heads to Virginia Tech in the fall to pursue a Ph.D. in math. She hopes to be a role model for other women in STEM.

Two students from the College of Science have been awarded the competitive 2021 Goldwater awards.

Malgorzata Peszynska, professor of applied mathematics at Oregon State University, has received the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Geosciences Career Prize.

In recognition of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, held on February 11, we acknowledge the women faculty, students and alumnae of the OSU College of Science.

Genomics pioneer Dr. Michael Waterman (’64, ’66) has received the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics. Waterman, a distinguished College of Science alumnus, is widely regarded as a trailblazer in computational biology. His work in the 1980s formed one of the theoretical cornerstones for many DNA mapping and sequencing projects, including the Human Genome Project.

At Oregon State, Scott Clark (08) was able to pursue majors in physics, mathematics and computational physics all at once. Today he is the CEO and co-founder of SigOpt.

Malgorzata Peszynska, elected in the section on Mathematics, is the 18^th faculty member in the College of Science to be elected as AAAS Fellow.

Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics, or TRACE-COVID-19, was launched by OSU in April 2020 with door-to-door sampling in Corvallis and expanded to other cities around the state while also adding a wastewater testing component. In December, OSU received a $2 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to create a national TRACE Center that will expand the OSU’s COVID-19 public health project to other states.