In 2021, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Dr. Beth Malmskog was awarded a $249,926 grant from the National Science Foundation in its Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways – Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) program. Since then, Malmskog has used this grant to support several research students, develop a research collaboration incubator for CC’s Mathematics and Computer Science Department, direct research-focused travel, increase the opportunities for underrepresented students and faculty in mathematics, and offer a Bridge Scholars Program course that uses inquiry-based learning modules. The grant directly supported summer research by Cooper Tull ’25, Esa Chen ’25, and Reuben Alter ’25, and supported collaborative research with Na’ama Nevo ’23, who is now a graduate student in Mathematics at Northeastern University.
“It was such a great honor and joy to be awarded this grant,” Malmskog says. “I had a set of ideas and activities that I believed in, so it was really affirming and exciting to get the chance to pursue them.”
The LEAPS-MPS program helps launch the careers of pre-tenured faculty at institutions that traditionally do not receive significant funding from the NSF, such as some minority-serving institutions or predominantly undergraduate institutions. One of the goals of the LEAPS-MPS program is to achieve excellence through diversity and broaden participation to include members from historically excluded and underrepresented in the mathematical and physical sciences.
Malmskog was awarded the grant for her proposal entitled, LEAPS-MPS: Foundational Connections in Number Theory, Coding Theory, Graphs, and Fair Redistricting, which supports her work in two distinct areas: error-correcting codes and ways to detect and prevent gerrymandering. Error-correcting codes are methods for building smart redundancy into stored or transmitted data so that small errors don’t corrupt the information. These algorithms ensure that saved documents and sent messages will be able to be retrieved or received exactly as intended. Through error-correcting codes, Malmskog uses number theory and geometry to ensure the reliability, efficiency, and security of cloud storage and computing.
Discrete mathematics can be used to detect and prevent gerrymandering by helping mathematicians create millions of random valid district maps for a region. Then these maps can be overlaid with real election data, showing how many seats each party would have won if voters had been voting in the randomly generated districts. This lets mathematicians see what outcomes would occur for a state if no gerrymandering was happening. If an enacted map is an outlier compared to this baseline, then it is likely to be the result of gerrymandering. This technique is called ensemble analysis, and Malmskog used this grant to apply ensemble analysis in new applications and settings, including applications with societal impacts.
Malmskog originally received a two-year grant and planned to teach the Bridge Scholars course last summer, but due to program management shifts, she requested and received an extension on the grant to teach the class this summer. How do you know? Math you can count on will introduce incoming first-year Bridge Scholars to concepts in discrete math and statistics, such as basic combinatorics, binomial coefficients, Latin squares and experimental design, probability, and hypothesis testing. Many Bridge Scholars are from underrepresented groups or are first-generation college students, so this class will give students who are traditionally underrepresented in math the opportunity to receive mentorship and access to discrete math education at the beginning of their undergraduate careers. Malmskog will co-teach this pass/fail class with Dr. Flavia Sancier-Barbosa, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. Sancier-Barbosa is also a collaborator on the redistricting research supported by this grant.
This is the first time that this class will be taught, though it is based in part on materials Malmskog previously developed for other classes.
“Flavia and I are developing the class to explore how some fairly simple mathematical ideas and tools have surprising power to help students form and answer their own questions about the world,” Malmskog says. “We hope that students come away empowered to apply their mathematical and logical minds to questions that do not, at first glance, look like math. More broadly, this class has the goal of expanding the STEM capacity of the Bridge Scholars Program. This program has so many fantastic offerings from talented teachers, but there has been room for more STEM. We hope to engage with students who are skeptical of math as well as those who already love it.”
You can learn more about Malmskog’s work by visiting her website.