Preparing Students to Collaborate on High-Risk Problems from Industry

This grant supports the participation of twenty-four students in the Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling Camp and the Mathematical Problems in Industry Workshop, organized by Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The camp and workshop provide an opportunity for students in the mathematical sciences to receive training that allows them to apply their academic knowledge to challenging real-world problems posed by companies in need of their technical insight. The students are first led through a four-day camp in which experienced mentors guide them through industrially inspired mathematical problems, focusing on problem formulation, mathematical analysis and computation, teamwork, communication, and the ability to explain technical results in terms that convey their value to non-technical audiences. The students then join professors, post-doctoral associates, and returning camp students for a week-long workshop at which they tackle high-risk problems, presented by participating companies. Students will leave the camp-workshop event with a deeper understanding of how they can contribute to a competitive workforce, and the company representatives will leave with a report that offers important insights into their challenging problems. Lasting collaborations and offers of employment regularly result from both the camp and workshop. In 2026, the Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling Camp will be held at the University of Delaware. The host site of the Mathematical Problems in Industry Workshop the week following will be selected from various nearby institutions that have successfully served as past hosts. Host sites are chosen to balance the organizational workload among experienced and new hosts, facilitating the transfer of best practices to a growing network of future Camp and Workshop sites, and to maximize the opportunity to recruit new industrial participants local to the host site. SIAM provides critical support in several ways, including promotion, access to applicable expertise, a development team in contact with potential company participants, staff support, and an assessment strategy that allows continuous improvement of the joint impact of the camp and workshop on workforce development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.