School of Business

Interests

Teaching

• Teaching is a lifelong career choice for me. As such, my overall interest is focused on personal growth as an Educator. I plan to achieve this by taking advantage of professional development opportunities, attending conferences, and absorbing information from leaders and colleagues.
  
  I am interested in teaching courses that are directly or indirectly related to applied math, statistics, and mathematics education. I also hold a strong interest in engagement with course development. Specifically, designing courses that are relevant to specific majors by tailoring specified applications with mathematics techniques and strategies that are practical.

Research

• Research Goals
  My current and previous research have served as a segue into what truly motivates me as a mathematics educator; instituting a model that soundly measures the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion programs. Measuring qualitative attributes with quantitative models is subject to both implicit and explicit biases. The issue of assessing these programs is further exacerbated by statistical manipulation of data to support agendas, funding, and headlines. Removing subjectivity and implementing a mathematical model that addresses the complexities of properly fitting data and considers the biases that exist in mathematics and statistics as it relates to diversity and inclusion is my ultimate research goal.
  
  Current Work
  My current research is based on operational risk. In the world of finance, appropriately understanding risk is key to success or failure because it is a fundamental driver for institutional behavior. As such, calculating risk is of utmost importance. Our focus is on risk as it relates to the operations of financial institutions, namely operational risk. Quantifying operational risk begins with data in the form of time series of realized losses, with the goal of developing sound methods to calculate important statistics of various loss categories that may be utilized to benefit the institution. Our desire is to estimate the risk of losses on a long-time scale by developing mathematical techniques that estimate the mean, variance, and co-variances of various loss categories. This challenge is exacerbated by having to account for both the frequency and severity distributions of losses. We introduce a stochastic point process model for the frequency distribution that has two important parameters (average frequency and time scale or memory half-life). Additionally, we will demonstrate the strengths and shortcomings of our new approach by using available loss data from several operational risk categories. Our loss distribution model and correlation calculations will then be compared to common industry practices.
  As it applies to my overall research goals, this research project was intentionally selected to enhance my understanding of statistics, specifically cross-correlation, covariance, and autocovariance of events, the development of mathematical modeling skills, and enhancing my understanding of stochastic processes. These are all tools that are key to finding solutions to my future research questions, and instrumental in guiding me toward my research goals.
  
  Future Work
  The next step in my research journey is to align research experiences and develop a concrete model that impacts the way we measure the effectiveness of a specific diversity program as it applies to mathematics education. While surveys help us to gain insights into attitudes and perceptions, it is not a true measure of the success of a diversity program. There are current models that exist and must be explored. Likewise, there is a vast number of research articles geared toward diversity and inclusion. All of this material must be scrutinized and built upon to develop a feasible model that institutions, both educational and noneducational, can utilize to measure the effectiveness of programs they have implemented or are considering investing in.