NSF awards Auburn’s COSAM and College of Education $1 million to research how body size and reproduction evolve in the natural environment

Auburn University’s Tonia Schwartz, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Sciences and Mathematics (COSAM), and Melody Russell, professor of science education, and Endowed Alumni Professor in the College of Education, are the recipients of a four-year award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with David A. W. Miller, associate professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, and Amanda Sparkman, associate professor of biology at Westmont College.

The award provides Auburn University with $1,073,793 of funding from the NSF with a total of $2.1 million for the entire award across all three institutions. The grant will enable more than 30 undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral scientists and teachers to be part of this NSF funded research project.

The team aims to understand how body size traits and reproduction characteristics are connected by studying five reptiles that have naturally become smaller living in isolated habitats on the California Channel Islands, in this project “How to get SMAL: Studying island dwarfism to find Shared Molecular mechanisms Across Life history traits”. 

Auburn mathematician works with international team of physicists and mathematicians to win best software award at ISSAC 2023

The International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) takes place every two years; the 2023 edition took place last month in Tromso, Norway. ISSAC is the premier showcase for progress in computational algebra, with Maplesoft and the German Fachgruppe Computeralgebra jointly awarding a prize for the best new software.

This year the prize went to a team of physicists and mathematicians for their work on the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). The team consisted of physicists Yang-Hui He (London/Oxford), Vishnu Jejjala (Witwatersrand), Brent Nelson (Northeastern) and mathematicians Mike Stillman (Cornell) and Hal Schenck (Auburn).

Summer 2023 Dean's List

Congratulations to all of the COSAM students on the Dean's List! 

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