(Dougherty, Anne Margaret - 2018) -- Doug Faires Award
Overview
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Anne Dougherty has been with the CU Applied Math Department since 1994, and currently serves as a Senior Instructor and the department’s Associate Chair. She “particularly enjoys working with undergraduate students and watching them grow and develop.” Throughout the courses she’s taught, she has always tried to provide her students with the motivation and desire to think for themselves. As such, Dougherty has been a strong advocate for student participation in the MCM/ICM for over twenty years. According to Anne, “the spirit of MCM/ICM resonates with my own beliefs on what constitutes a strong undergraduate Applied Math education, and I would love to see more participants.” Over the years, other CU faculty have joined Anne in her efforts to recruit MCM/ICM participants and train the teams. Professors Bengt Fornberg and Manuel Lladser have worked with various teams to help them prepare for the contest. Every year before the MCM/ICM contest, there are 4-6 training sessions in which the rules and main steps (e.g. picking a problem, the process of solving it, etc) of the contest are reviewed. Additionally, Professor Scot Douglass, the Director of the Engineering Honors Program, has been instrumental in recruiting students from a wide variety of majors and STEM disciplines. Over time, they have found that the strongest teams are comprised of students from different majors and with different interests and skills. Given everyone’s combined effort, CU Boulder’s participation in the MCM/ICM contest has increased from 3-5 teams to over 15 teams in just the past few years.
