News | Emory REU Computational Mathematics for Data Science

Call for Summer 2026 Applications

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our applications website for REU applicants is now live. We will start reviewing applications on February 1 and all applications received by March 1 will receive full consideration.

Our theme will be Computational Science and AI for New Mathematics. This year’s projects span both pure and applied mathematics, exploring how modern AI can push the boundaries of mathematical discovery. For more information about the application process, see this page and for a list of projects see the Summer 2026 tab.

For questions about the program, please contact Dr. Levon Nurbekyan at levon.nurbekyan@emory.edu.

2026 Project Mentors

Dr. Levon Nurbekyan - AI-Assisted Exploration of the Polygonal Faber-Krahn Inequality
Dr. Marco Tezzele and Dr. Jimena Martin Tempestti - Generative AI for Structure Discovery in Cardiovascular Digital Twins
Dr. Deependra Singh - AI-Assisted Exploration in Algebra and Number Theory

Call for Summer 2025 Applications

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our applications website for REU applicants is now live. As we did last year, we are using NSF’s new ETAP system for the first time, which should make it easy for applicants to apply. We will start reviewing applications on February 1 and all applications received by March 1 will receive full consideration.

Our theme will be Models meet Data. For more information about the application process, see this page and for a list of projects see the Summer 2025 tab.

Highlights from Our 2024 Summer REU Program

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This summer, we welcomed 15 talented students from across the country on Emory’s beatiful campus. Under the umbrella theme Learning from Images, the students worked in five teams, each diving into projects aimed at advancing our understanding and ability to learn from imaging data. This program, held over eight weeks on campus, provided the young researchers with an opportunity to engage in cutting-edge computational mathematics and machine learning.

The Learning from Images theme tackled a timely challenge: how to make sense of the overwhelming amount of imaging data generated daily. Computational algorithms can unlock insights from this data, improving our ability to detect new patterns and enhance image quality, especially in areas critical to healthcare. Each project addressed a unique aspect of this challenge—from improving image distribution models and optimizing measurement designs to refining algorithms for reconstructing image sequences. You can read more about the projects here.

The students worked with their mentors to explore and develop advanced imaging techniques that leverage machine learning, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and differential equations. Weekly project meetings, a seminar series, and various social events fostered an engaging learning environment. Students had the chance to present their progress in midterm presentations, culminating in a highly anticipated final poster session.

The poster session marked the program’s grand finale, drawing a large crowd of faculty, students, and postdocs. Each team showcased their findings and shared insights from their experiments, highlighting the strengths and potential areas of improvement for their algorithms. By a narrow margin, this year’s poster award went to the team of Malia Walewski, Rishi Leburu, Claire Gan, and Callihan Bertley for their project on Improving VAEs with Normalizing Flows. The picture below shows Malia and Rishi presenting their work.

All teams created a poster blitz video and wrote blog posts about their work, which are now live on the 2024 tab. These additional resources capture the excitement and innovation of the program and give a closer look into the students’ experiences.

We’re proud of our 2024 REU cohort and look forward to following their careers in the years to come!

Call for Summer 2024 Applications

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our applications website for REU applicants is now live. This year, we are using NSF’s new ETAP system for the first time, which should make it easier for applicants to apply. We will start reviewing applications on February 1 and all applications received by March 1 will receive full consideration.

For more information about the application process, see this page and stay tuned for a list of projects to be posted a the Summer 2024 tab.

Learning from Images

The amount of imaging data generated every day exceeds human imagination. With their ability to statistically analyze such large datasets, computational algorithms can enhance our ability to discover new patterns and improve imaging data quality for critical healthcare applications and beyond.

This theme’s projects provide new mathematical insights and algorithms enabling learning from image data. The goals of the individual projects include improving algorithms for learning the distribution of image data, optimizing the measurement design to improve image quality, developing efficient algorithms for reconstructing image sequences, and generalizing machine learning techniques to learn transformations between images.

The projects build upon and advance state-of-the-art techniques from machine learning, numerical linear algebra, and differential equations. Students will learn about these techniques and be trained to combine them in new ways to build effective algorithms. Their analysis and experiments will provide new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches.

Emory Welcomes 2023 REU/RET Participants on Campus

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is an exciting week for us as we finally entered the core phase of our 2023 REU/RET. We are delighted to have a diverse and talented group of participants joining us from different states and institutions. They will spend the next six weeks on Emory’s campus and will have access to state-of-the-art facilities, resources, and mentorship. We look forward to getting to know them and supporting them throughout this journey.

The theme of this year’s program is data for social justice and our five teams will explore various topics related to this theme from a mathematical perspective. Our projects span topics motivated by health disparities, environmental justice, and fairness in deep learning. The participants will study and develop mathematical algorithms and computational tools to analyze and solve open challenges in these areas. They will have plenty of opportunities to meet with their mentors and peers who will provide feedback and guidance.

In the next six weeks, our participants will not only work on their research projects, but also engage in a variety of activities that will enhance their skills and knowledge in data science. Our weekly seminar and ad-hoc lectures will train participants in most aspects of mathematical research in this area and give advice on career development.

We are excited to kick off this program and look forward to a productive and fun summer with our participants!

Participants present their work at the REU/RET Poster Session

Sun, 26 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In their last week on campus, our REU/RET teams presented their work in our annual poster session. The event was held in our beautiful atrium and was a magnet for many students, postdocs, and faculty from the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science.

In preparation for the event and to advertise their work, the teams made two-minute Poster Blitz videos. Since the videos were full of creativity, we played them during the event using our smart screen. The videos are now hosted at:

During the event, more than a dozen judges had the difficult task of scoring the quality of the posters, how well the teams presented and explained their work, and the results of the research itself, to determine the winning team. All teams scored very well on and with the smallest of margins, the poster on reinforcement learning vs. optimal control won the award. The team consists of Arjun Sethi-Olowin (a rising senior at Rice University), Dewan Chowdhury (a rising junior at Rutgers University), and Jacob Mantooth (a rising senior at East Central University). They each received a $50 gift card from a major online retailer.

But no one left empty-handed! Our official REU/RET t-shirts, designed by our outreach committee, arrived just in time. Also, we held a raffle with Emory and SIAM merchandise. Here, Jim Nagy presents one of the main prizes, a pair of SIAM socks, going to Logan Knudsen:

We thank the Department of Mathematics for making the poster session a huge hit and providing the prizes.

Emory Welcomes 2022 REU/RET Participants on Campus

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks the first day of our core REU/RET phase 2022, and we are delighted to welcome our participants from across the country to our beautiful campus. This year on our site, 22 undergraduate researchers and four teachers will work on eight projects under the theme Models meet Data. All projects will combine tools from computational mathematics (modeling, differential equations, optimization, linear algebra) with statistical and data science techniques (deep learning, reinforcement learning, data assimilation) to tackle challenging research questions.

Over the next six weeks, the groups will have several milestones which give opportunities to practice most modes of scientific communication. In their research contracts, the participants will organize their collaboration and develop a timeline for the project. Their midterm presentations give an excellent opportunity to expose synergies and ideas across the teams. The participants will also create a blog post about their work, and there will be a poster session toward the end of the program. Throughout the six weeks, the teams will work on a manuscript that describes their project.

In addition to working on this packed research schedule, we will have many events to foster learning (e.g., ad-hoc lectures, a weekly seminar), networking (e.g., excursions and other social events organized by the participants), and professional development (e.g., scientific writing workshops, career panels).

Besides the NSF support, we are also grateful for the support from Emory’s Department of Mathematics, which provides the top-notch facilities to run this program smoothly and funds to host events such as this morning’s breakfast. In addition to one co-working area, a computer pool, and two seminar rooms dedicated to our site, we’ll also try out our department’s computing facilities and new digital whiteboard.

REU Participants Receive National Fellowships

Fri, 20 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to congratulate Manuel Santana and Katie Keegan, who participated in our program in the summer of 2021, on winning nationally-competitive scholarships that will accelerate enhance their graduate school career.

Manuel Santana, a 2021 Goldwater Scholar, who graduated with a BA in Computational Mathematics from Utah State University was awarded a prestigious scholarship through the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Besides his research on computational methods that accelerate the reconstruction of computed tomography on our site, he also worked on combinatorics, and shared many tutorials for solving algebra problems. He will join Cal Tech for his PhD.

Katie Keegan was offered not only an NSF GRFP but also a [Computational Science Graduate Fellowship by the US Department of Energy]0(https://www.krellinst.org/csgf/), which she accepted. Katie completed her BS in Applied Mathematics at Mary Baldwin College this spring and participated in two REUs. In the summer of 2020, she was part of ICERM’s REU and published a paper on a modified watermarking scheme based on the SVD, which was later also featured in SIAM News. On our site she developed a tensor SVD-based classification algorithm for fMRI data. We are extremely delighted that Katie will join our Computational Mathematics PhD program starting this fall.

2022 Projects and Mentors Announced

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With the application deadline for the summer 2022 program approaching, we’re delighted to announce the project topics and mentors. This year, we will have six projects centered on the theme models meet data. Applications include storm surge modeling and neuroscience and mathematical techniques cover a variety of topics ranging from data assimilation to deep neural networks and reinforcement learning. The teams will be mentored by faculty from Emory’s department of Mathematics and Computer Science and two former faculty and students who will join us as guest mentors. A full list of topics can be found on the Summer 2022 page. Applications for the REU and RET are due on March 1.