In the News

In recent years, some articles have feature my research, outreach efforts, and personal story.

Research

“Recently, Tara Stewart-Merrill discovered at Illinois that the freshwater plankton Daphnia can recover from infection with a virulent fungal parasite. Previously, biologists assumed that Daphnia could not recover from that parasite. Following that discovery, Stewart Merrill began a collaboration with Rivera-Quiñones to see what these findings meant for disease dynamics.” - Abby Paeth

This work was done in conjunction with both our advisors Dr. Zoi Rapti and Dr. Carla Cáceres. I was amazed that a biological assumption was overturned with new data! To explore the implications of this discovery, we used a differential equations model to study how the immune responses (clearance) and physiological barriers (resistance) impact the disease dynamics of our system. Check out a brief article about our work: “At the intersection of plankton and numbers” .

Personal Story

Lathisms.org’s, goal is to provide an accessible platform that features prominently the extent of the research and mentoring contributions of Latinxs and Hispanics in different areas of the Mathematical Sciences. I was extremely honored to be featured in their calendar and to be interviewed in their podcast series . You can find out more about this initiative in my blog post “A tribute to Hispanic Heritage Month” . Also, I was very excited to be featured in the AMS Next Generation of Mathematics poster, in which I share the best advice piece of advice I received in graduate school.

As a Latina, I’ve become very aware of the challenges members from underrepresented group face in the math community. I’ve writen several posts offering my own (and shared) reflections on how to build a more inclusive environment that encourages and promotes diversity and the importance of community. You can read more here: Broadening the Horizons of Teaching and Diversity in Mathematics Departments (with Marissa Loving, Simone Sisneros-Thity, Sunny Xiao), Reflections of the LatMat Conference 2018, and Towards Embracing Diverse Mathematical Communities.

Service

This summer, I am co-facilitating the Mathematics Summer Workshop for Achieving Greater Graduate Educational Readiness ( Math SWAGGER) program with an amazing team of fellow mathematicians Michael Young, Pamela Harris, Shelby Wilson, Alexander Diaz, and Luis Sordo-Viera. You can read more on what the program hopes to achieve and why we think its crucial to create a space where underrepresented minorities can thrive in our blog post.

Back in 2017, in collaboration with the I-STEM initiative, I designed a one-day course to showcase to 30 Illinois high-school students the power of mathematics in modeling disease spread. This was so fun! Using the game VAX , students were given a limited number of vaccines and applied them to a network (breaking a link from one person to another) to try to stop a disease from spreading. Check out a summary here: I-STEM Multidisciplinary Summer Program Exposes UHS Athletes to Different STEM Departments/Units .

“In a website game, called VAX, students were given a limited number of “quarantines” (breaking a link from one person to another) to try to stop a disease from spreading. Once the disease got started, however, it spread rapidly from person to person. The students were quite engaged as they scrambled to try stop the spread of the disease—with varying degrees of success.” - Elizabeth Innes