African Diaspora Joint Mathematics

ADJOINT 2025

June 30, 2025 to July 11, 2025

Description

ADJOINT is a yearlong program that provides opportunities for U.S. mathematicians – especially those from the African Diaspora – to conduct collaborative research on topics at the forefront of mathematical and statistical research. Participants will spend two weeks taking part in an intensive collaborative summer session at SLMath. The two-week summer session for ADJOINT 2025 will take place June 30 to July 11, 2025 in Berkeley, California. Apply via MathPrograms.org Researchers can participate in either of the following ways: Joining ADJOINT small groups under the guidance of some of the nation's foremost mathematicians and statisticians to expand their research portfolio into a new area. (View: 2025 research topics and leaders) Applying to Self-ADJOINT as part of an existing or newly-formed independent research group (three-to-five participants is preferred) to work on a new or established research project. (View: Group application instructions) Throughout the following academic year, the program provides conference and travel support to increase opportunities for collaboration, maximize researcher visibility, and engender a sense of community among participants. ADJOINT enriches the mathematical and statistical sciences as a whole by providing a platform for researchers, especially members of the African Diaspora mathematical and statistical communities, to advance their research and careers and deepen their engagement with the broader research community. Download flyers to share with your colleagues or department (PDF) ADJOINT Directors Dr. Edray Goins (Pomona College) Dr. Caleb Ashley, (Boston College) Dr. Naiomi Cameron (Spelman College) - 2025 site director Dr. Anisah Nu’Man (Spelman College) Dr. Donald E.K. Martin (North Carolina State University) +Program Activity ADJOINT and Self-ADJOINT participants will: Conduct research at SLMath within a small group of mathematical and/or statistical scientists Participate in professional enhancement activities provided by the onsite ADJOINT Director Receive funding for two weeks of lodging, meals and incidentals, and one round-trip travel to Berkeley, CA After the two-week workshop, each participant will: Have the opportunity to further their research project with the team members including the research leader Have access to funding to attend conference(s) or to meet with other team members to pursue the research project, or to present results Become part of a network of research and career mentors +Eligibility All ADJOINT and Self-ADJOINT participants must be US citizens or permanent residents, possess a PhD in the mathematical or statistical sciences, and be employed at a US institution. All participants must be in residence and actively engaged in the program 8:30 am - 5:00 pm daily (without teaching, mentoring, or other professional responsibilities) for the full two-week duration on site at SLMath. Self-ADJOINT researchers may be part of only one group’s application. For a complete list of application materials required, and research topics and leaders for ADJOINT individual applicants, see below. +Funding & Support The following support will be provided to all ADJOINT and Self-ADJOINT participants: Lodging at a hotel in Downtown Berkeley designated by SLMath All meals Reimbursement of travel expenses to and from Berkeley $2,000 per person for post-programmatic travel To allow visitors to fully participate in its scientific activities, SLMath is pleased to be able to offer Childcare Grants to researchers with children ages 17 and under. SLMath prides itself on welcoming mathematicians and statisticians from all backgrounds and on actively promoting the participation of members from groups historically underrepresented in the mathematical and statistical sciences. We encourage members of these groups to apply for family support grants. Historically underrepresented groups include women, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx/Hispanic persons, persons with disabilities, and members of the LGBT+ community. Space permitting, mathematicians and statisticians who are spouses or partners of invited group members will be offered shared office space. +Selection Process The guiding principle in selecting participants and establishing the ADJOINT groups is the creation of diverse teams whose members come from a variety of institutional types and career stages. The degree of potential positive impact on the careers of African-Americans in the mathematical and statistical sciences will be an important factor in the final decisions. ADJOINT 2025 (Individual Applicants) Apply to ADJOINT 2025 (Individuals) Application Deadline: February 4, 2025 Application Requirements (ADJOINT) Applicants must provide: a cover letter specifying which of the offered research projects you wish to be part of; if more than one, please indicate your priorities a CV a personal statement, no longer than one page, addressing how your participation will contribute to the goals of the program (e.g., why you are a good candidate for this workshop and what you hope to gain) a research statement, no longer than two pages, describing your current research interests, and relevant past research activities, and how they relate to the project(s) of greatest interest to you (e.g., what motivates your current interests and what is your relevant research background) Due to funding restrictions, only US citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply. 2025 ADJOINT Research Leaders and Topics Applicants must specify which of the offered research projects they wish to join. Research Leaders: Loni Philip Tabb (Drexel University) - "County-level Cardiovascular Health Metrics and Their Relationship with Social Determinants of Health – What’s the Importance of Residential Segregation?" To promote a paradigm shift from a focus solely on the absence or presence of cardiovascular disease (CVD), the American Heart Association (AHA), in 2010, defined a novel construct of cardiovascular health (CVH). This broader and more positive construct was termed Life’s Simple 7 (LS7) and was based on seven health behaviors and factors. Specifically, the LS7 framework included indicators of dietary quality, participation in physical activity, exposure to cigarette smoking, and measures of body mass index, fasting blood glucose, total cholesterol, and blood pressure levels – where each metric was characterized as poor, intermediate, or ideal. While significant evidence exists that documents the prevalence, determinants, outcomes and mechanisms of CVH utilizing the LS7 framework, in 2022, the presidential advisory of the AHA introduced an enhanced approach at assessing CVH, where new metrics were considered, and the age spectrum was expanded to also include the entire life course. As such, Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) was developed, where the components included: diet (updated), physical activity, nicotine exposure (updated), body mass index, blood lipids (updated), blood glucose (updated), blood pressure, and sleep health (new). While geographic variations in CVH have been identified, based on the original LS7 CVH framework, to our knowledge, a county-level CVH score, based on the AHA’s LE8 conceptual framework, has not yet been developed. In particular, population level estimates that capture the 8 components of CVH have not been utilized to create a standardized score to characterize the county-level CVH environment. Such a county-level metric could aid in describing the CVH environment more broadly, with an eye towards creating more informed and evidence-based policies and even interventions targeted at improving CVH overall. Utilizing data from two well-known publicly available datasets found in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention PLACES and the County Health Rankings and Roadmap, we aim to address the following goals: (1) create a county-level CVH score based on the AHA’s LE8 framework and the previous AHA’s LS7 framework; (2) quantify and contrast the geographic heterogeneity in the county-level CVH scores to better understand the patterning of CVH across US counties; and (3) determine the geographic patterning in the association of county-level CVH with residential segregation (a known predictor of CVH). Findings from this research will help organizations like the American Heart Association, as well as public health researchers and practitioners, medical professionals, health systems, and policy makers to further understand the county-level CVH environment – with an eye towards improving CVH at the individual- and population-levels. Pre-requisites: Computing abilities with R/Python (importing and merging data from several publicly available data sources), data wrangling and cleaning, regression modeling, spatially varying regression modeling (basic/introductory understanding) Dr. Loni Philip Tabb is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. Shanise Walker (Clark Atlanta University) - "Directed Antimagic Graphs" In graph theory, graph labeling is a technique used to assigned labels to the vertices, edges, or both of a graph according to specific criteria. Rosa introduced the concept of graph labeling in 1967 to investigate the cyclic decompositions of the complete graph into isomorphic subgraphs. Various problems and applications (scheduling, communication networks, coding theory, etc.) have been studied using graph labeling. One such study is on antimagic graphs introduced by Hartsfield and Ringel in 1990 where the authors proved various graph families were antimagic. There has been extensive research on determining whether graphs are antimagic. In this research project, we will focus on directed antimagic graphs. The notion of antimagic graphs was extended to directed graphs by Hefetz, Mütze, and Schwartz in 2010. An antimagic labeling of a directed graph is a bijection on the set of arcs in the graph with integers such that all oriented vertex sums are distinct. An oriented vertex sum is the sum of labels of all arcs entering that vertex minus the sum of labels of all arcs leaving it. Hefetz, Mütze, and Schwartz proposed the following two questions: 1. Is every orientation of any simple connected undirected graph antimagic? 2. Does every undirected graph admit an antimagic orientation? Counterexamples to the first question were found using the complete bipartite graph with partite sets of sizes one and two, denoted , and the complete graph on three vertices, denoted . The goal of this project to explore the following open question and conjecture of Hefetz, Mütze, and Schwartz. 3. Is every connected directed graph with at least four vertices antimagic? Conjecture: Every connected undirected graph admits an antimagic orientation. Pre-Requisites: Familiarity with basic graph theory and general graph labeling. Bibliography: J. A. Gallian. "A dynamic survey of graph labeling." Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 1. Dynamic Surveys (2023): DS6. D. Hefetz, T. Mütze, and J. Schwartz. "On antimagic directed graphs." Journal of Graph Theory 64(3) (2010): 219-232. J. Jin and Z. Tu. "Graph antimagic labeling: A survey." Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Applications 16(1) (2024): 2330002. D. B. West. Introduction to graph theory. Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall (2001). Dr. Shanise Walker is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Clark Atlanta University. Self-ADJOINT (Research Groups) Apply to Self-ADJOINT 2025 (Groups) Application Deadline: February 4, 2025 Application Eligibility & Requirements (Self-ADJOINT) Groups of no less than three members (three to five participants are preferred) should submit one joint application for the group. Each member of the group must have a Ph.D. in the mathematical or statistical sciences. All team members must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents based in the U.S. All members must be in residence and actively engaged in the program 8:30 am - 5 pm daily (without teaching, mentoring, or other professional responsibilities) for its duration: June 30 to July 11, 2025. Researchers may be part of only one group’s application. Applicants must provide: a cover letter specifying which of the offered research projects you wish to be part of; if more than one, please indicate your priorities a CV a personal statement, no longer than one page, addressing how your participation will contribute to the goals of the program (e.g., why you are a good candidate for this workshop and what you hope to gain) a research statement, no longer than two pages, describing your current research interests, and relevant past research activities, and how they relate to the project(s) of greatest interest to you (e.g., what motivates your current interests and what is your relevant research background) Due to funding restrictions, only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply. Applications require a Project Description, a statement on alignment with program goals, as well as additional information. Project Description: The project description should not exceed two pages, should be aimed at a broad mathematical audience, and must contain the following: A brief history of the collaboration (if applicable) The broader mathematical context and motivation for the research area A description of the goals, impact, and specific research problems to be addressed If applicable, a description of the partial results already obtained A timeline for the project, including the research that will be accomplished before, during, and after the two-week residency at SLMath Statement on Alignment with Program Goals: The statement on alignment with program goals should not exceed two pages. This statement should describe why the proposed group and collaboration fits with the aims of the program which are to: “Provide space, funding, and the opportunity for in-person collaboration to small groups of mathematicians, especially members of the African Diaspora, whose ongoing research may have been disproportionately affected by various obstacles including professional isolation, heavy teaching or administrative workloads, lack of access to funding, and/or family obligations. Through this effort, SLMath aims to mitigate the obstacles faced by these groups, improve the odds of research project completion, and deepen their research experience. The goal of this program is to enhance the mathematical sciences as a whole by positively affecting the research and careers of all of its participants and assisting their efforts to maintain involvement in the research community.” In particular, this statement should describe how participation in ADJOINT will positively affect the careers of each participant. If you prefer not to share information regarding obstacles you may have overcome with respect to your career, you may focus on the latter half of the above goals statement. Additional Information: In addition to the Project Description and Statement on Alignment with Program Goals, the following information is required: A list of all members on the research team (three-to-five participants is preferred), including home institution, email address, confirmation of U.S. citizenship or permanent residency, year of PhD, and current position. Please include gender, racial, and ethnic identification of each member of the research team. This demographic information is voluntary and will enable us to measure our progress with respect to our mission. Please note that this information is reported only on an aggregated basis and is not an individual factor in decision-making. A biographical sketch (following NSF format) of no more than three pages for each of the team members. Each sketch should include no more than 10 publications relevant to the proposed projects If applicable, a list of Mathematics Subject Classification Codes (primary and secondary) A list of keywords

ADJOINT is a yearlong program that provides opportunities for U.S. mathematicians – especially those from the African Diaspora – to conduct collaborative research on topics at the forefront of mathematical and statistical research. Participants will spend two weeks taking part in an intensive collaborative summer session at SLMath.

The two-week summer session for ADJOINT 2025 will take place June 30 to July 11, 2025 in Berkeley, California.

Apply via MathPrograms.org

Researchers can participate in either of the following ways:

Joining ADJOINT small groups under the guidance of some of the nation's foremost mathematicians and statisticians to expand their research portfolio into a new area. (View: 2025 research topics and leaders)
Applying to Self-ADJOINT as part of an existing or newly-formed independent research group (three-to-five participants is preferred) to work on a new or established research project. (View: Group application instructions)

Throughout the following academic year, the program provides conference and travel support to increase opportunities for collaboration, maximize researcher visibility, and engender a sense of community among participants.

ADJOINT enriches the mathematical and statistical sciences as a whole by providing a platform for researchers, especially members of the African Diaspora mathematical and statistical communities, to advance their research and careers and deepen their engagement with the broader research community.

Download flyers to share with your colleagues or department (PDF)

ADJOINT Directors

Dr. Edray Goins (Pomona College)
Dr. Caleb Ashley, (Boston College)
Dr. Naiomi Cameron (Spelman College) - 2025 site director
Dr. Anisah Nu’Man (Spelman College)
Dr. Donald E.K. Martin (North Carolina State University)

+Program Activity

ADJOINT and Self-ADJOINT participants will:

Conduct research at SLMath within a small group of mathematical and/or statistical scientists
Participate in professional enhancement activities provided by the onsite ADJOINT Director
Receive funding for two weeks of lodging, meals and incidentals, and one round-trip travel to Berkeley, CA

After the two-week workshop, each participant will:

Have the opportunity to further their research project with the team members including the research leader
Have access to funding to attend conference(s) or to meet with other team members to pursue the research project, or to present results
Become part of a network of research and career mentors

+Eligibility

All ADJOINT and Self-ADJOINT participants must be US citizens or permanent residents, possess a PhD in the mathematical or statistical sciences, and be employed at a US institution.

All participants must be in residence and actively engaged in the program 8:30 am - 5:00 pm daily (without teaching, mentoring, or other professional responsibilities) for the full two-week duration on site at SLMath.

Self-ADJOINT researchers may be part of only one group’s application.

For a complete list of application materials required, and research topics and leaders for ADJOINT individual applicants, see below.

+Funding & Support

The following support will be provided to all ADJOINT and Self-ADJOINT participants:

Lodging at a hotel in Downtown Berkeley designated by SLMath
All meals
Reimbursement of travel expenses to and from Berkeley
$2,000 per person for post-programmatic travel
To allow visitors to fully participate in its scientific activities, SLMath is pleased to be able to offer Childcare Grants to researchers with children ages 17 and under. SLMath prides itself on welcoming mathematicians and statisticians from all backgrounds and on actively promoting the participation of members from groups historically underrepresented in the mathematical and statistical sciences. We encourage members of these groups to apply for family support grants. Historically underrepresented groups include women, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx/Hispanic persons, persons with disabilities, and members of the LGBT+ community.
Space permitting, mathematicians and statisticians who are spouses or partners of invited group members will be offered shared office space.

+Selection Process

The guiding principle in selecting participants and establishing the ADJOINT groups is the creation of diverse teams whose members come from a variety of institutional types and career stages. The degree of potential positive impact on the careers of African-Americans in the mathematical and statistical sciences will be an important factor in the final decisions.

ADJOINT 2025 (Individual Applicants)

Apply to ADJOINT 2025 (Individuals)

Application Deadline: February 4, 2025

Application Requirements (ADJOINT)

Applicants must provide:

a cover letter specifying which of the offered research projects you wish to be part of; if more than one, please indicate your priorities
a CV
a personal statement, no longer than one page, addressing how your participation will contribute to the goals of the program (e.g., why you are a good candidate for this workshop and what you hope to gain)
a research statement, no longer than two pages, describing your current research interests, and relevant past research activities, and how they relate to the project(s) of greatest interest to you (e.g., what motivates your current interests and what is your relevant research background)

Due to funding restrictions, only US citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply.

2025 ADJOINT Research Leaders and Topics

Applicants must specify which of the offered research projects they wish to join.

Research Leaders:

Loni Philip Tabb (Drexel University) - "County-level Cardiovascular Health Metrics and Their Relationship with Social Determinants of Health – What’s the Importance of Residential Segregation?"
- To promote a paradigm shift from a focus solely on the absence or presence of cardiovascular disease (CVD), the American Heart Association (AHA), in 2010, defined a novel construct of cardiovascular health (CVH). This broader and more positive construct was termed Life’s Simple 7 (LS7) and was based on seven health behaviors and factors. Specifically, the LS7 framework included indicators of dietary quality, participation in physical activity, exposure to cigarette smoking, and measures of body mass index, fasting blood glucose, total cholesterol, and blood pressure levels – where each metric was characterized as poor, intermediate, or ideal. While significant evidence exists that documents the prevalence, determinants, outcomes and mechanisms of CVH utilizing the LS7 framework, in 2022, the presidential advisory of the AHA introduced an enhanced approach at assessing CVH, where new metrics were considered, and the age spectrum was expanded to also include the entire life course. As such, Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) was developed, where the components included: diet (updated), physical activity, nicotine exposure (updated), body mass index, blood lipids (updated), blood glucose (updated), blood pressure, and sleep health (new). While geographic variations in CVH have been identified, based on the original LS7 CVH framework, to our knowledge, a county-level CVH score, based on the AHA’s LE8 conceptual framework, has not yet been developed. In particular, population level estimates that capture the 8 components of CVH have not been utilized to create a standardized score to characterize the county-level CVH environment. Such a county-level metric could aid in describing the CVH environment more broadly, with an eye towards creating more informed and evidence-based policies and even interventions targeted at improving CVH overall.
  
  Utilizing data from two well-known publicly available datasets found in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention PLACES and the County Health Rankings and Roadmap, we aim to address the following goals: (1) create a county-level CVH score based on the AHA’s LE8 framework and the previous AHA’s LS7 framework; (2) quantify and contrast the geographic heterogeneity in the county-level CVH scores to better understand the patterning of CVH across US counties; and (3) determine the geographic patterning in the association of county-level CVH with residential segregation (a known predictor of CVH). Findings from this research will help organizations like the American Heart Association, as well as public health researchers and practitioners, medical professionals, health systems, and policy makers to further understand the county-level CVH environment – with an eye towards improving CVH at the individual- and population-levels.
- Pre-requisites: Computing abilities with R/Python (importing and merging data from several publicly available data sources), data wrangling and cleaning, regression modeling, spatially varying regression modeling (basic/introductory understanding)
- Dr. Loni Philip Tabb is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University.
Shanise Walker (Clark Atlanta University) - "Directed Antimagic Graphs"
- In graph theory, graph labeling is a technique used to assigned labels to the vertices, edges, or both of a graph according to specific criteria. Rosa introduced the concept of graph labeling in 1967 to investigate the cyclic decompositions of the complete graph into isomorphic subgraphs. Various problems and applications (scheduling, communication networks, coding theory, etc.) have been studied using graph labeling. One such study is on antimagic graphs introduced by Hartsfield and Ringel in 1990 where the authors proved various graph families were antimagic. There has been extensive research on determining whether graphs are antimagic.
  
  In this research project, we will focus on directed antimagic graphs. The notion of antimagic graphs was extended to directed graphs by Hefetz, Mütze, and Schwartz in 2010. An antimagic labeling of a directed graph is a bijection on the set of arcs in the graph with integers such that all oriented vertex sums are distinct. An oriented vertex sum is the sum of labels of all arcs entering that vertex minus the sum of labels of all arcs leaving it. Hefetz, Mütze, and Schwartz proposed the following two questions:
  
  1. Is every orientation of any simple connected undirected graph antimagic?
  2. Does every undirected graph admit an antimagic orientation?
  
  Counterexamples to the first question were found using the complete bipartite graph with partite sets of sizes one and two, denoted , and the complete graph on three vertices, denoted . The goal of this project to explore the following open question and conjecture of Hefetz, Mütze, and Schwartz.
  
  3. Is every connected directed graph with at least four vertices antimagic?
  
  Conjecture: Every connected undirected graph admits an antimagic orientation.
- Pre-Requisites: Familiarity with basic graph theory and general graph labeling.
- Bibliography:
  - J. A. Gallian. "A dynamic survey of graph labeling." Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 1. Dynamic Surveys (2023): DS6.
  - D. Hefetz, T. Mütze, and J. Schwartz. "On antimagic directed graphs." Journal of Graph Theory 64(3) (2010): 219-232.
  - J. Jin and Z. Tu. "Graph antimagic labeling: A survey." Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Applications 16(1) (2024): 2330002.
  - D. B. West. Introduction to graph theory. Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall (2001).
- Dr. Shanise Walker is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Clark Atlanta University.

Self-ADJOINT (Research Groups)

Apply to Self-ADJOINT 2025 (Groups)

Application Deadline: February 4, 2025

Application Eligibility & Requirements (Self-ADJOINT)

Groups of no less than three members (three to five participants are preferred) should submit one joint application for the group.
Each member of the group must have a Ph.D. in the mathematical or statistical sciences.
All team members must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents based in the U.S.
All members must be in residence and actively engaged in the program 8:30 am - 5 pm daily (without teaching, mentoring, or other professional responsibilities) for its duration: June 30 to July 11, 2025.
Researchers may be part of only one group’s application.

Applicants must provide:

a cover letter specifying which of the offered research projects you wish to be part of; if more than one, please indicate your priorities
a CV
a personal statement, no longer than one page, addressing how your participation will contribute to the goals of the program (e.g., why you are a good candidate for this workshop and what you hope to gain)
a research statement, no longer than two pages, describing your current research interests, and relevant past research activities, and how they relate to the project(s) of greatest interest to you (e.g., what motivates your current interests and what is your relevant research background)

Due to funding restrictions, only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply.

Applications require a Project Description, a statement on alignment with program goals, as well as additional information.

Project Description: The project description should not exceed two pages, should be aimed at a broad mathematical audience, and must contain the following:

A brief history of the collaboration (if applicable)
The broader mathematical context and motivation for the research area
A description of the goals, impact, and specific research problems to be addressed
If applicable, a description of the partial results already obtained
A timeline for the project, including the research that will be accomplished before, during, and after the two-week residency at SLMath

Statement on Alignment with Program Goals: The statement on alignment with program goals should not exceed two pages. This statement should describe why the proposed group and collaboration fits with the aims of the program which are to:

“Provide space, funding, and the opportunity for in-person collaboration to small groups of mathematicians, especially members of the African Diaspora, whose ongoing research may have been disproportionately affected by various obstacles including professional isolation, heavy teaching or administrative workloads, lack of access to funding, and/or family obligations.

Through this effort, SLMath aims to mitigate the obstacles faced by these groups, improve the odds of research project completion, and deepen their research experience. The goal of this program is to enhance the mathematical sciences as a whole by positively affecting the research and careers of all of its participants and assisting their efforts to maintain involvement in the research community.”

In particular, this statement should describe how participation in ADJOINT will positively affect the careers of each participant.

If you prefer not to share information regarding obstacles you may have overcome with respect to your career, you may focus on the latter half of the above goals statement.

Additional Information: In addition to the Project Description and Statement on Alignment with Program Goals, the following information is required:

A list of all members on the research team (three-to-five participants is preferred), including home institution, email address, confirmation of U.S. citizenship or permanent residency, year of PhD, and current position. Please include gender, racial, and ethnic identification of each member of the research team. This demographic information is voluntary and will enable us to measure our progress with respect to our mission. Please note that this information is reported only on an aggregated basis and is not an individual factor in decision-making.
A biographical sketch (following NSF format) of no more than three pages for each of the team members. Each sketch should include no more than 10 publications relevant to the proposed projects
If applicable, a list of Mathematics Subject Classification Codes (primary and secondary)
A list of keywords

Show less

Logistics

Program Logistics can be viewed by Members. If you are a program member then Login Here.