Senior math major is awarded AT&T Labs Fellowship

Desmond Torkornoo, a senior mathematics major from Falls Church, Va., has been awarded an AT&T Labs Fellowship, which provides three years of funding to outstanding under-represented minority and women students pursuing or planning to pursue a Ph.D. in computer and communications-related fields.

Winners of the fellowship are graduating seniors or first- and second-year graduate students in the field of computer science, mathematics, electrical engineering, systems engineering, industrial engineering, operations research or related fields. The fellowship provides all educational expenses during the academic year, educational expense for summer study or university research, a stipend for living expenses, support for attending scientific conferences, a summer internship during the student’s first summer in the program and a mentor who is a staff member at AT&T Labs.

Torkornoo, who grew up in Koforidua, Ghana, received the fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in operations research. Operations research is an interdisciplinary branch of applied mathematics that uses methods such as mathematical modeling, statistics and algorithms to arrive mathematically at the best possible solution to a problem in order to improve the performance of the system. Examples of optimization problems include maximizing profit, increasing crop yield, finding faster assembly line, minimizing cost and lowering risk.

Torkornoo’s research record includes two summers in the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduate’s program, one at Valparaiso University in 2006 and one at Trinity University in 2007. At Valparaiso, University Torkornoo researched under Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo, a graph theorist, to find an efficient way to assign frequencies to radio stations in a given geographic location, while taking into consideration the distances between all the radio stations so as to avoid radio frequency interference.

At Trinity University, Torkornoo worked under Scott Chapman, an algebraist, to design an algorithm for computing the omega values in finitely generated numerical monoids. Torkornoo is currently working on papers with research teams from both NSF experiences.

At Richmond, Torkornoo researched with Van Nall, a topologist and associate professor of mathematics, as part of the mathematics honors program. He holds both University and Bonner scholarships. He is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and The Management Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Mathematical Society. He is a member of the Sankofa African Student Alliance on campus and has worked at the Medical College of Virginia Hospitals, as an after-school tutor at the YMCA and as an EMT for Tuckahoe Rescue Squad.

Torkornoo has presented research at the Joint Math Meetings of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society in New Orleans and in San Diego and has presented twice at the Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics (S.U.M.S.) conference at James Madison University in Virginia. In October 2007, his talk and poster at the S.U.M.S. conference won the prize for top pure-math research presentation.

As part of the AT&T Labs Fellowship Program, Torkornoo will spend the upcoming summer doing research at AT&T’s Florham Park Research Lab in New Jersey and will be mentored by David S. Johnson, who earned his doctoral degree in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and does research in optimization. He plans to begin his doctoral program in industrial engineering and operations research at University of California–Berkeley in the fall.

Posted April 6, 2008