Clarkson University President Tony Collins has announced that Diana White has been promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor of Mathematics in the School of Arts & Sciences.
White is a Mathematical Biologist originally from Newfoundland, Canada. Besides Mathematics, White enjoys the sea, hiking, painting, gardening, and spending time with her family, which includes her supportive husband Jon and amazing toddler Sophie.
By exploring research problems at the interface between mathematics and biology, White provides new ways of looking at problems that are difficult, and often impossible to understand using experimental techniques alone. Her work involves solving problems that directly impact human and community health, a goal that is fundamental to the research projects she seeks out.
Since White’s program started at Clarkson, she has won a number of grants to both facilitate her research, and to make advancements in STEM efforts that focus on making math fun and more accessible to high school students in her local area. In her first year at Clarkson, she received state funding from the NYSDEC to support her work in modeling the spread and control of invasive aquatic species (AIS), and more recently was awarded a federally funded B-WET grant to support a pilot high school Project WHIRL (Protectors of the Watershed Habitat in the Indian Rivers Lakes), a for-credit program to train tomorrow’s watershed leaders. The project’s overarching goal is to allow students to tackle pressing issues in watershed management, collecting data and using math & stats, to understand the crucial importance of these quantitative skills in solving real problems that face our local watershed. Aside from ecological problems, White still sticks to her roots of mathematical cellular biology. Recently, she was awarded an NSF grant, working in collaboration with Biologist Abigail Jensen from UMass Amherst, to develop mathematical and biological models to understand the dynamics of rod cells in the eye.
White teaches many classes across the undergraduate and graduate levels, in addition to helping drive the growing bio-math community at Clarkson. Over White’s 5 years at Clarkson, she has received 5 letters from the Dean of A & S for outstanding teaching.
In her larger professional community, she has written many papers in peer-reviewed journals and has contributed work at conferences and workshops at the local, national and international levels, most recently speaking at the SIAM’s Annual Conference in summer 21 on her work regarding invasive species, which was highlighted in SIAM’s summer newsletter. This summer, she will speak at the SIAM Education Conference on “Innovative Approaches to Undergraduate Research Mentorship”. Since starting work at Clarkson, White has mentored 15 undergraduate students in summer research projects, which resulted in her engaging in efforts to make research more innovative and equitable to the undergraduate community.
White is a strong advocate for women in science and has volunteered many hours working with WISEST: Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science & Technology; a program at the University of Alberta dedicated to empowering women in all fields of science, engineering and technology. In addition, she is a member of WIMB, Women in Mathematical Biology, a group that works to support women as they advance in their careers as Mathematical Biologists.
