Encourage Diversity. Stay Connected.
WINCOM Virtual Conference
Celebrating 5 years of Women in Combinatorics!
July 15-16, 2024
Dates: Monday July 15th and Tuesday July 16th
Time: 8:45am-5:30pm Eastern Daylight Time
Location: Virtual via Zoom (links to be emailed to registrants)
​
The main goal of this virtual conference is to build a supportive community as well as celebrate the research advances of historically underrepresented groups in combinatorics and related fields. This conference also aims to highlight the role of Women in Combinatorics in creating an international network of combinatorialists in the last five years. To register for this conference, kindly fill out this form on or before July 12 at 11:59PM. Registration is free and open to everyone! Zoom links will be emailed only to registered participants.
​
​
​
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Pamela Harris, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Sommer Gentry, New York University
Sophie Spirkl, University of Waterloo
Gabriela Araujo-Pardo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Confirmed Invited Special Sessions:
Colourings on Graphs (Amanda Montejano)
Combinatorial Designs (Andrea Burgess and Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil)
Combinatorial Geometry (Sylvia Fernández Merchant)
Combinatorial Matrix Theory (Jane Breen and Hermie Monterde)
Combinatorics on Polytopes (Amy Wiebe and Isabelle Shankar)
Network Theory (Erin Meger)
Quantum Information on Graphs (Harmony Zhan and Xiaohong Zhang)
Spectral Graph Theory (Sasmita Barik and Hermie Monterde)​​​
​
Plenaries
Please join us in welcoming our 2024 Plenary Speakers!
Pamela Harris
Finding Needles in Haystacks: Boolean intervals in the weak order of the symmetric group
Monday July 15th - 9am
Dr. Pamela E. Harris, a Mexican-American mathematician, currently serves as Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She earned her B.S. from Marquette University, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dr. Harris specializes in algebraic combinatorics and has authored over 70 peer-reviewed research articles in esteemed journals. Recognized for her contributions, she is a Fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the Association for Women in Mathematics. Dr. Harris's dedication to mathematical education has earned her numerous accolades, including the prestigious 2022 MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Excellence in Mathematical Education. Additionally, she has mentored over 120 undergraduate students, particularly from historically excluded groups, and facilitated undergraduate research programs at respected institutions. Beyond her academic achievements, Dr. Harris is also a leader in promoting diversity and inclusion in mathematics, serving as President and co-founder of Lathisms and co-hosting the podcast Mathematically Uncensored, while co-authoring several influential books on advocacy in mathematics education.
Induced subgraphs and treewidth
Monday July 15th - 1pm
Sophie Spirkl is an assistant professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo. She received her PhD in 2018 from Princeton University under the supervision of Maria Chudnovsky and Paul Seymour. Sophie's research focuses on structural graph theory and in particular on induced subgraphs and colouring. In 2023, Sophie received a Sloan fellowship.
Sophie Spirkl
Sommer Gentry
Multi-objective integer programming formulations for kidney exchanges
Tuesday July 16th - 9am
Sommer Gentry is a Professor of Surgery and a Professor of Population Health at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, and Co-Director of the Center for Surgical and Transplant Applied Research. She is a senior investigator with the Scientific Registry for Transplant Recipients. She designed matching optimization methods used for nationwide kidney paired donation registries in both the United States and Canada, and helped pass a law legalizing paired donation in the United States. Her redistricting work was also instrumental in pushing the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to make major policy changes that reduced geographic disparities in transplantation. Her work has attracted the attention of major media outlets including Time Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Science, the Discovery Channel, and National Public Radio. She was formerly a Professor of Mathematics at the US Naval Academy, and in that role received the MAA’s Henry L. Alder award for distinguished teaching by a beginning mathematics faculty member, was a finalist for the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner prize for excellence in operations research practice, and received the US Naval Academy’s 2021 Civilian Faculty Excellence in Research award.
On Mixed Graphs
Monday July 15th - 1pm
Martha Gabriela Araujo Pardo is a mathematician, teacher, and Ph.D. in Mathematics, currently serving as the president of the Mexican Mathematical Society since 2022. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Sciences at UNAM in the year 2000 and completed a postdoctoral stay at the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Spain, in 2002. Additionally, she realized a sabbatical stance at the Université Libre de Bruxeles in 2020. Currently, she is a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics (Juriquilla Unit) and holds a Level III position in the National System of Researchers of CONACYT. Her area of expertise is discrete mathematics, specifically finite geometries and their relationship with graph theory. She has authored approximately 70 research articles, supervised theses at all levels, and participated in over 80 national and international conferences. She was awarded the "Sofía Kovalevskaya Support" by the Mexican Mathematical Society and the Sofía Kovalevskaya Foundation 2003. She has been a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences since November 2013 and received the "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 2013" recognition from UNAM in the same year. She is a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) for the advancement of science in developing countries since 2024. She has been involved in promoting the activity and presence of women (and, in general, underrepresented groups) in various academic spaces within mathematics. She served as a board member of the SMM from 2012 to 2014 and coordinated the Equity and Gender Commission of the Mexican Mathematical Society from 2014 to 2018. She represented researchers from the Institute of Mathematics, Juriquilla Campus, in the Commission for Equality, Equity, and Respect for Diversity of the Institute of Mathematics at UNAM in 2019. From 2020 to 2022, she was a member of the Gender and Diversity Commission of the Mathematical Union of Latin America and the Caribbean (CGD-UMALCA). She has been Mexico's ambassador to the "Committee of Women of Mathematics" of the International Mathematical Union since August 2016.
Gabriela Araujo-Pardo
