SIAM Names Two Project NExT Fellows for 2024-2025

SIAM is pleased to announce that Marissa Gee of Kenyon College and Trevor Leslie of the Illinois Institute of Technology have been selected as the 2024-2025 SIAM Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching) Fellows. Congratulations to these outstanding early-career mathematicians!

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) organizes Project NExT—a professional development program for new or recent Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences—to bolster numerous aspects of participants’ careers in academia, including the teaching and learning of mathematics, research and scholarship, service to the community, and other professional activities. Project NExT supports faculty at the start of their careers by offering workshops, a peer network, and mentorship as they navigate their academic paths.

Since 2020, SIAM has sponsored two Project NExT Fellows on a yearly basis. This annual sponsorship is one of many ways in which SIAM supports the professional development of junior faculty, especially in the area of applied mathematics education. Early-career faculty in postsecondary environments help to ensure that students from all types of backgrounds obtain the necessary skills to tackle the complex, real-world applied mathematics problems of the future. Over the course of their first year, each cohort of Project NExT Fellows participates in a range of programs to prepare them for this instructional role. Workshops and information sessions strengthen instructors’ abilities to engage students in specific types of math courses, support mentees from historically underserved groups, involve undergraduate students in mathematics research, ready future K-12 mathematics teachers for the workforce, write grant proposals, and balance teaching and research.

SIAM aids in this important faculty development by encouraging Fellows to participate in activities with the SIAM Education Committee. For example, Fellows help to arrange SIAM-sponsored events at the Joint Mathematics Meetings and MAA Mathfest, organize minisymposia at SIAM conferences, and volunteer for Student Days activities at the SIAM Annual Meeting. Fellows also contribute to the planning and execution of SIAM outreach events and enhance engagement with undergraduate and graduate SIAM student chapters. 

SIAM Project NExT Fellow Marissa Gee is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Kenyon College. Her research focuses on optimal control problems with applications in robotics and ecology. Gee earned a B.S. in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College in 2018 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell University in 2021 and 2024, respectively. In graduate school, she joined the Cornell University SIAM Student Chapter and attended SIAM conferences with generous support from the SIAM Student Travel Award; both experiences benefited her greatly. She is excited to continue engaging with the community as a Project NExT Fellow.

Gee is also passionate about effective and inclusive mathematics education. As a Ph.D. candidate, she helped to lead workshops on effective grading, inclusive assessment, and universal design at Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation and the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning. Gee incorporates real-world applications and projects into her classes, often drawing inspiration from her interactions with other applied mathematicians. She hopes to instill her students with an appreciation for mathematics as a tool to better understand the world and looks forward to further growth as an educator at Kenyon.

Trevor Leslie, the other 2024-2025 SIAM Project NExT Fellow, is an assistant professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Tech. His research interests include partial differential equations, mathematical fluid dynamics, and collective behavior. Leslie’s latest work uses a “sticky particle” discretization scheme to predict clustering features of solutions to the Euler alignment system; this framework has already been implemented by other researchers in the field and was the primary basis for a recent grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Leslie is an active speaker and contributor to conferences and symposia. He is currently co-organizing a weeklong interdisciplinary workshop on collective behavior in complex systems that will take place at the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation in March 2025; he is also slated to co-organize the next conference of the Great Lakes Section of SIAM, which will be held at Illinois Tech in September 2025. As a dedicated instructor and mentor, Leslie currently supervises one Ph.D. student and one master’s student. He regularly teaches a wide range of courses in analysis, differential equations, and related topics.

Before arriving at Illinois Tech, Leslie held postdoctoral positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, and University of Southern California. He received a B.S. in mathematics from Indiana University Bloomington, an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from UIC. Leslie has been an active member of the SIAM community since his time as a graduate student, when he twice co-organized the Chicago Area SIAM Student Conference: a joint meeting between the students of Illinois Tech, UIC, and Northwestern University. He now aspires to foster the same mathematical enthusiasm in his students that he enjoyed during his own studies.

Applicants for Project NExT must submit a personal statement, research statement, one-page curriculum vitae, and letter of support from their department chair. Eligibility requirements include a recent Ph.D. in mathematics, statistics, mathematics education, or another math-intensive field; a current teaching position; and experiences, attitudes, ideas, and leadership abilities that would contribute to the cohort. To be considered for SIAM sponsorship, applicants must note their SIAM membership on their application. An MAA committee selects all Fellows. Visit the Project NExT website for further details and consider applying before the next deadline of April 15, 2025!

A single faculty member can have an immeasurable impact on their students’ careers in mathematics, positively influencing both SIAM and the broader scientific community as a whole. We encourage junior SIAM members who are pursuing careers in academia to consider the Project NExT program as a way to improve applied mathematics education for the next generation of interdisciplinary problem-solvers.