Timpanogos Lodge in Provo Canyon became an academic gathering place on October 9 when supporters of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (CPMS) gathered for the semi-annual College Volunteer Leadership Council (CVLC) meeting.
Members of the CVLC travelled from as far away as China to learn about the status of CPMS. Dean Scott Sommerfeldt opened this fall’s meeting with a report on the state of the college.
“The big news, as far as what’s been going on, is growth,” Sommerfeldt said. “We’ve had some real significant growth that continues to happen.”
CPMS students now make up 8.6 percent of the total BYU student body. The Department of Computer Science has been growing the fastest and now includes more than 900 majors.
Sommerfeldt also recognized recent faculty award winners and introduced new faculty.
“We’ve been extremely impressed with the quality of the candidates who are applying and the people that we’re actually hiring,” Sommerfeldt said.
The next speaker was Jeffrey Keith, a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and former associate academic vice president for undergraduate studies. Keith recounted some of the history of BYU and its mission to “assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life.”
Keith described some of the mentoring relationships between faculty and presidents of BYU, and emphasized that learning improves with personal interaction and shepherding. Keith also said that while no one has reached his or her full potential yet, scholars and saints can still help and lift each other.
“The mission of BYU is not about perfection,” Keith said. “It’s about the quest for perfection. And I think that’s exactly the course we should be on.”
After Keith’s remarks, the CVLC heard from three new faculty members, who described their research in three-minute “research networking” pitches. David Wingate spoke about his computer science research in making machine learning tools more accessible to average people.
“Machine learning will become increasingly important to more and more people,” Wingate said. “More and more people will rely on the tools of machine learning to get their jobs done.”
Next, statistics professor Robert Richardson shared his research in modeling assumptions, and physics professor Brian Anderson spoke about his work in time reversal acoustics.
The research networking was followed by lunch and poster presentations, where attendees were able to meet representatives from each department in the college and ask questions about current research.
When the council reconvened after lunch, students and faculty from the computer science and chemistry departments spoke about their current work.
Computer science professors Kent Seamons and Daniel Zappala spoke about cyber security. Seamons is working with students on a program called PWM, or Private Web Mail, that will allow normal email program users to send encrypted messages. Zappala and his students are developing a web authentication system called Trusthub that confirms the identity of websites.
Josh Anderson and two of his students from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry taught about their research efforts to stop chemoresistance in cancer cells. Anderson emphasized the benefit to BYU undergraduates who, through outside funding, participate in relevant research.
“At BYU, while we don’t have the sheer numbers of labs that places like Duke or Harvard or Stanford have, the research that we put out is of a quality that is similar to those schools,” Anderson said. “It’s very high quality. The unique aspect that we have at BYU is that an essential part of our mission is to mentor undergraduates.”
Sommerfeldt closed the meeting by thanking CVLC members for their contributions to and love for CPMS.
“We appreciate your involvement with the college,” Sommerfeldt said. “We appreciate when you share ideas with us.”