UH Math graduate and undergraduate students helped connect Pearl City Elementary school students to some of the exciting and creative sides of mathematics, at a STEM night event. Participants include PhD student Sam Glickman and Alan Tong, undergraduate math majors Sakura Takahashi and Jhon Lawrence Bulosan, and faculty member Yuriy Mileyko. The event was covered by UH News, and the article contains more details (and great photos!).
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UH PhD students attend SLMath Summer Schools
Every summer, the Simons Laufer Mathematics Insitute (SLMath, formerly known as MSRI) hosts a wide array of summer schools for graduate students. In Summer 2026, two UH PhD students attended these summer schools: Janani Lakshmanan attended the “Principled Scientific Discovery with Formal Methods” school at the IBM Research Campus in Yorktown Heights, New York. And Kawika O’Connor who attended the “Topological and Geometric Structures in Low Dimensions” school in Berkeley, CA.
“The summer school brought together graduate students from all over the country at very different stages of their careers and gave us a crash course in the current frontiers of machine learning. We did a lot of hands-on learning, and it really gave me a lot more confidence in writing code. We also were invited to present our own work and make connections with researchers at IBM. “ -Janani Lakshmanan.
“It was a lot of fun meeting other graduate students at around the same point in their careers. I will admit to having quite a bit of imposter syndrome going into the summer school, but that — thankfully — dried up pretty quickly. It was very hands on, very geometric, and just an all around blast. ” – Kawika O’Connor.
We include a couple of photos below:
UH Math PhD student Janani Lakshmanan in front of Quantum System II, the most advanced quantum computer in the world right now.
Students gathering data on pendulum frequencies to feed into an AIHilbert program, a brand new machine-learning powered polynomial regression model introduced by researchers at Samsung and IBM.
Takagi explores bacteria/fungi interactions
UH News has written about Department of Mathematics faculty member Daisuke Takagi’s exciting collaborative research on interactions between bacteria and fungi. The work is a collaboration with Nhu Nguyen from the Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience. It is being funded through an NIH grant.
As Takagi says in the article: “This project lets us combine math and biology to uncover the hidden rules of how bacteria spread, which could impact everything from health to the environment.”
See the full article here.
Glickman selected for advocacy workshop in Washington D.C.
UH PhD student Glickman was one of three fellows, selected by the American Mathematical Society in a highly competitive nationwide search, to participate in Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering Workshop in Washington D.C. The goal of the program is to train the next generation of scientists with the tools needed to successfully communicate with policymakers around important scientific topics.
Glickman’s experience was written in a recent UH News article.