Dr. Olga Bagatourova, Ph. D., is currently one of the Vice Presidents of the Bank of America in Dallas, Texas. She has worked for many years as a Process Design Engineer for the Bank of America, NA. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Management Sciences (Moscow) in 1980, and since then she has worked in both Industry and Academia. Her research interests include mathematical and soft programming methods, artificial intelligence and data mining. She has extensive experience in development and implementation of scheduling methods and tools in manufacturing and quasi-manufacturing environments. Dr Bagatourova has published many journal articles in her area of research.

Dr. Kimberly Drews, Ph.D., received her doctoral degree in Statistics from Texas Tech University in 2002, and then accepted a post-doctoral traineeship in the Department of Statistics at Texas A & M University.  She is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  Her primary appointment is with the Biostatistics Center, which is a clinical trail coordinating center.  She is involved with a multi-site trail examining a multi-component program designed to reduce risk factors of type 2 diabetes in middle school aged children.  Due to the multi-component nature of the project she not only works with other statisticians but also with people from other fields such as physicians, nutritionists, and exercise scientists.  Her responsibilities at The Biostatistics Center include statistical design and analysis, and all procedures in between, development of all materials involved in carrying out the trial, overseeing the correct implementation of all procedures, and logistics involved with efficient functioning and interaction of all sites involved in the trial.  Her position requires not only the use of statistical skills learned while getting her degree, but also the logical reasoning skills that resulted from her mathematics studies.

Dr. Cindy Martin, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas. She graduated from Texas Tech University with a PhD in Applied Mathematics, in May 2003. She has been recognized on numerous occasions for her effective interaction with her students. We are including an excerpt from one of her interviews (PKAL Faculty for the 21st Century): ``One of the age old questions that you hear in math is “What do we use this for?” When I reached graduate school, a whole new world of Mathematics was opened up to me. So many students and professors were working on these really exciting projects that varied from aircraft wing flutter, to robots, to bird wing structure and so on. I really loved hearing about how mathematicians were needed to work on all of these problems. It seemed like everything around me included mathematics. I knew that I had never really understood the underlining connection to the world around me, and the understanding that Math was really the language of Science before that time. I had always just loved math because I liked the challenge. I started wondering why we did not show undergraduates the underlining connections of math to the world around them. I knew that science majors eventually would see it - but what about those who did not progress beyond a year of science? What about the Math majors? As I started my own profession as a professor of mathematics, I knew that I wanted to spread my excitement and passion for the subject to my students. I want them to walk away with an understanding that Mathematics is very useful in the world around them.''

Amanda Allen Texas Tech Mathematics student.

Jessica Meixner Texas Tech Mathematics student.

Moderator: Dr. Magdalena Toda