My name is Ryan Rogers, and I am a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kentucky, where I am in my sixth year of graduate school. My interests lie primarily in undergraduate mathematics education and especially in how undergraduates learn analysis. For my dissertation work, advised by David C. Royster, I used case study methodology to investigate the impact of an introductory real analysis course on undergraduate students' understanding of function continuity and how this concept relates to the notions of limits and differentiability. As a research assistant, I have also worked alongside Benjamin Braun and Chloe Urbanski Wawrzyniak to explore how identity shapes experiences and beliefs of students in mathematics. Secondary interests include analysis and partial differential equations; prior to completing my doctoral work, I earned my master's degree upon successfully defending my research on honeycomb Schrödinger operators in the tight-binding model under the guidance of Peter D. Hislop in May 2021.
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, I attended Purcell Marian High School and graduated as the valedictorian of the Class of 2014. A first-generation college student, I then earned the full-tuition Darwin T. Turner Scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, where I graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and a minor in Spanish in December 2017. My undergraduate capstone project, From Euclidean Spaces to Metric Spaces, was supervised by Ning Zhong and is published in the Journal of Student Research. In 2018, I received the Robert McKibbin Prize for Outstanding Male Graduate, which is conferred in recognition of scholarly achievement, strength of character, and contribution to community, as well as the Helen Weinberger Phi Beta Kappa Award. During my undergraduate career at UC, I was actively involved in several organizations and societies on campus and completed at least 15 community service hours each semester. I worked as a Supplemental Review Session Leader in the Math and Science Support (MASS) Center, where my responsibilities included downloading and printing calculus exercises provided by faculty members, distributing them to the students who enrolled in my weekly supplemental review courses (each worth one credit hour and graded on a pass/fail basis), facilitating sessions in ways that encouraged students to learn and think independently, and grading students on attendance and participation. I worked with students taking Calculus I and Calculus II and received positive evaluations from them, as they described me as knowledgeable and approachable. This experience helped to solidify my aspiration to become a professor of mathematics and share the beauty of math with others. Since graduating from UC, I have privately tutored a GED student in mathematics, volunteered as a math tutor at Purcell Marian High School, and worked as a Mathnasium Instructor at the Mathnasium of Hyde Park. These endeavors have allowed me to see many ways that people of all backgrounds most effectively learn, understand, and retain mathematical concepts. Because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to education, especially in math, I aim to keep this in mind as a teaching assistant in graduate school. I have served as both a recitation instructor and a primary instructor for a wide variety of undergraduate math courses at UK. I enrolled in the doctoral degree program in mathematics at the University of Kentucky and joined the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics shortly after completing my bachelor's degree at the University of Cincinnati. Throughout the 2022-2023 academic year, I served as the secretary of the University of Kentucky Chapter of Spectra, a professional association of mathematicians that arose from a need for community for gender and sexual minority mathematicians. In this capacity, I co-organized the Spectra Survey of Mathematics Conference 2023 and co-wrote the grant proposal to the National Science Foundation that secured much of the funding for this conference. I have passed the Ph.D. preliminary exams in real analysis, partial differential equations, and numerical analysis, advanced to doctoral candidacy in August 2022, and passed my doctoral dissertation defense in January 2024. In April 2024, I received the Inclusive Excellence Award from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kentucky. I expect to earn my Ph.D. in May 2024. Please feel free to continue perusing this site and contact me if you have any questions. |