Gina Marie Pomann, graduating this year magna cum laude with a major in mathematics and a minor in statistics, has accepted an NIH training grant, which includes tuition and a stipend, from North Carolina State University. Her goal is to earn a Ph.D. in 
statistics.
Gina was offered a similar grant from the University of Washington and was chosen by AT&T as their graduate fellowship recipient. For more information about that fellowship see http://www.research.att.com/index.cfm?portal=20. Also, Gina was awarded a first year “excellence fellowship” from Rutgers.
As an undergraduate at TCNJ, Gina participated in summer research at Princeton University. For that work Gina won two awards. Her poster, entitled “Semi-Automatic Spike Sorting using KlustaKwik”, received the Poster Prize Winner award at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, Washington D.C. (2009) and the Outstanding Contribution and Research Presentation Award, for poster presentation at the Society for the
Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans (SACNAS) Conference (2008). Her advisor at Princeton was Dr. Carlos Brody. Gina explained that she “performed research for Dr. Carlos Brody, using the Classification Expectation Maximization algorithm, to classify waveforms and identify neurons responsible for specific brain functions.”
As a junior, Gina was named an Anita Borg Scholar and was awarded a $10,000 scholarship by Google. The Anita Borg Scholarship hopes to encourage women to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders. Gina visited the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA, as part of this award. During summer 2007 Gina conducted research at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at Berkeley in California.
Education started for Gina at a community college, from which she transferred to TCNJ. She thought that with a mathematics degree the only career option was teaching and, in her opinion, TCNJ was the best program for education. After taking an introductory statistics course and speaking to professors in the mathematics department about what she could do with a degree in the subject, she realized she could do much more with mathematics than she ever thought possible. Gina was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi before graduating from TCNJ this year.