Hello, I'm Nyah J. Davis

I passed my third--and final--written qualifying exam! After taking a class on Aperiodic Order this spring, I am continuing to read in the area under the direction of my advisor Dr. David Damanik. Later in August I travel to Germany to attend the conference Algebra, Analysis, and Aperiodic Order at Bielefeld University. I have also been invited to give an expository talk in the session on Quasi-Periodic and Disordered Systems at the AMS Fall Central Sectional Meeting in September at University of Texas--San Antonio. 

I will spend June working as a mentor for the EDGE 2024 Summer Program at University of Tennessee--Knoxville, where I will help prepare mathematicians of marginalized genders for success in doctoral programs. I plan to spend the next year narrowing my research interests and working towards understanding the work currently being done on that topic. At the same time, I am excited to receive my first graduate teaching assistant assignment and continue serving as the BGSA treasurer in the coming academic year.

I have completed my first year of graduate school at Rice University, and will soon attend the summer graduate school, Séminaire de Mathématiques Supérieures 2023: Periodic and Ergodic Spectral Problems at Université De Montréal, funded by SLMath. Once I return, I begin serving as Treasurer for the Black Graduate Student Association at Rice, and continue preparing for my remaining qualifying exams.

This fall I will be more deeply exploring a few potential research directions. Through a combination of coursework, seminars, and conferences, I hope to discover which subfield will be my best fit. 

This summer I am a participant of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education 2022 Summer Program for women in mathematics, hosted at the University of Oxford. The intensive program will help prepare me for the beginning of my doctoral study at Rice University in the Department of Mathematics, where I will be the inaugural recipient of their Raymond L. Johnson Fellowship and further supported by the 2022 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

I am a fourth year student at the University of Iowa and will be graduating with a Mathematics major and an Art minor in May 2022. I am working towards an honors thesis about General Representations of Finite-Dimensional Algebras with Dr. Ryan Kinser, supported through a RTG Undergraduate Fellowship. This year, I am serving as president of the Undergraduate Math Club and the UIowa AWM student chapter.

This summer, I conducted research through the 20th annual REU program at the University of Minnesota, and was the program's first African American participant. I will present preliminary research results from that REU on Lattice Models & Puzzles for Dual Weak Symmetric Grothendieck Polynomials at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics in January 2022.