MAA  Mathematical Association of America

Seaway Section

Hossein Shahmohamad received his PhD from University of Pittsburgh in 2000. His initial area of research was nowhere zero flows and chromatic polynomials. In the past 22 years at RIT, he has served as Director of Graduate Programs, won numerous awards, was elected the chair of RIT Academic Senate, served as SEAWAY chair, and yet has not lost his passion for teaching and working with students. He is an avid collector of cool puzzles and has published a book of puzzles in Farsi. He has a difficult time not running into some of his 4000 former students who are all scattered in New York State.

Darren A. Narayan was born and raised in Oswego, NY. He received his BS in mathematics from SUNY Binghamton, where he first served as a teaching assistant at the age of 18. Later he received his MS and PhD degrees in mathematics from Lehigh University developing his research area in graph theory. He joined the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2000 as an Exxon Mobil Project NExT Fellow, and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2010. In addition he has had visiting appointments at the University of South Carolina and the University of Rochester. He has published nearly 100 papers, including publications in Mathematics Magazine, the College Mathematics Journal and MAA FOCUS. He has received over $1.5 million in NSF grants supporting both innovations in teaching and undergraduate research. He lives in Rochester, NY with his wife Tamara (who he met through Project NExT) and daughters Sedona, and Micada.

Lorin Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and he holds a faculty position as an Associate Professor of Biostatistics at Brown University. His lab develops machine learning algorithms and statistical tools to understand how non-additive variation plays a role in complex traits and contributes to disease in diverse human populations. Some of his most recent work has landed him a place on Forbes 30 Under 30 list and recognition as a member of The Root 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2019. He has also been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a David & Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and a COPSS Emerging Leader Award. Prior to joining both MSR and Brown, Dr. Crawford received his PhD from the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Clark Atlanta University.

Dan received his PhD from Boston University studying Complex Dynamics and he currently serves as the Rutherford Professor of Mathematics at St. Lawrence University. His current research includes the dynamics of rational functions (with a particular interest in Sierpinski curve Julia sets and Julia sets related to the geometric action of circle inversion), text mining/stylometry, popular culture uses of mathematics in early 20th century pulp fiction, and mathematics pedagogy. Among other work, he has performed stylometric analyses of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and their various pastiches and written about H. P. Lovecraft’s use of non-Euclidean geometry for an invited paper in Lovecraft Annual. In his non-professional time, Dan enjoys spending time with his amazing spouse and their four cats, playing Dungeons & Dragons, running, and running while thinking about playing Dungeons & Dragons.