Rollins Math Students Selected for National Research Workshop

Mathematics majors Alejandro Santos Almonte ’29 and Maria Del Cid Naira ’29 were chosen from a competitive national pool of applicants to participate in the 2026 IDEAL Get Ready for Research workshop at Northwestern University, gaining an opportunity to explore academic research and connect with fellow students and researchers.

The IDEAL Get Ready for Research workshop is designed to introduce students to current research topics in mathematics, how researchers identify meaningful research problems, and what a researcher’s day-to-day work looks like. Students also gain insight into the types of research conducted by graduate students and explore pathways to pursue research in mathematics and data science.

Beyond these learning opportunities, Almonte and Naira collaborated with peers from other institutions during problem-solving sessions, exploring topics such as the Gale-Shapley algorithm, the Boston mechanism, and data storage optimization. These activities provided opportunities to apply mathematical concepts to real-world problems, exchange ideas with other students interested in mathematics and data science, and gain a better understanding of how mathematical research is conducted.

Both Almonte and Naira have been conducting undergraduate research in ethnomathematical modeling with math professor Zeynep Teymuroglu since this past spring.