Rick Gillman attended the governance meetings of the Mathematical Association of America in Portland Oregon, as Chair of the Mathematical Association of America’s Committee on Sections, he was a presenter at the new governors orientation meeting and presented the report of the strategic planning group on sections to the Board of Governors. While in Portland, he also attended MathFest, the MAA’s summer conference, at which he conducted the MAA section officer’s meeting and was a co-presenter of the mini-course on a game theory path to quantitative literacy.

Ken Luther also attended MathFest, representing the Indiana Section at the section officer’s meeting. Ken is Chair of the Indiana Section.

Lara Pudwell, Sara Crawford, and Daniel Maxin attended MathFest to complete their year long participation in Project NExT, a national professional development program for new faculty.  As part of their Project NExT activities, Daniel co-organized a panel session on outreach activities to K12 schools and Sara co-organized a panel on how to establish a successful UGR program. She also gave a contributed paper talk on lessons learned from leading her first UGR project. Melissa Desjarlais was one of the panelists in Daniel’s session and spoke about her work launching MATHCOUNTS clubs in nearby school districts.

Shane Drew attended MathFest as a member of the 2009-2010 ‘green dot’ cohort of Project NExT. He was one of 84 participants selected from nearly 200 applicants. Having attended MathFest 2009, he will continue with Project NExT activities at the January 2010 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco and complete the program with activities at the August 2010 MathFest in Pittsburgh. s a ‘peach dot’. Each cohort of Project NexT participants is given colored dots to wear on their name tags as identification and they continue to wear the dots long after the year of participation is completed as a sign of their membership in this elite group.)