Rice mathematician wins NSF CAREER Award

Damjanovic plans to use award to help recruit more women to the field

Danijela Damjanovic liked numbers from an early age, and when the time came to choose a career, mathematics felt like a natural choice. It wasn’t, however, a conventional choice for a young woman; when she started her Ph.D., she was sometimes the only woman in her classes.

DANIJELA DAMJANOVIC

The assistant professor of mathematics has just received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which will support her research and teaching and, she hopes, open doors for other young women who might want to become mathematicians.

The recognition is prestigious: The NSF awards only about 400 CAREER Awards each year to young scientists and mathematicians who are on track to become leaders in their fields.

Damjanovic studies dynamical systems — objects together with their evolution in time.

“One of the main goals is to understand not only the current state of the objects under consideration but also to be able to understand past and future behavior,” she said.

“Typically the systems which we mathematically understand so well that we can see their complete future and past are the systems which are relatively simple,” she said. Systems that people observe in nature are more complicated, but they sometimes can be approximated by a simple system, she said.

“If one can make predictions about future behavior for a simple system, does a small perturbation of that system mimic the behavior of the simple system?” Damjanovic asked. “Or perhaps, after a perturbation, new phenomena arise?”

The CAREER Award’s research money will allow Damjanovic to meet with other scholars in her field. This person-to-person contact is valuable, she said, because it gives scholars an opportunity to share what they know and build connections among their projects.

“Nowadays,” Damjanovic said, “the advancement always comes from joining efforts of people with deep understanding in related areas. It’s the essential part of research.”

The NSF grant also contains a portion designated for education. Damjanovic plans to use that funding to set up a program that will help teenage girls explore math and see careers in math and science as desirable and accessible.

Each spring, Damjanovic plans to offer a semester-long extracurricular course for young women that introduces the idea of dynamical systems, lets them work together on problems and projects and gives them a chance to interact with women who have built prominent careers in math and science.

The class of about 15 will be selected from among advanced students at local high schools who have a particular interest in math. Damjanovic said she hopes the class will show young women they’re not alone in pursuing math.

“My goal is to provide an environment in which they can experience a bit of mathematical exploration, have fun and become even more curious about the subject,” she said. She also wants to show them that “a career in mathematics for a woman is possible and enjoyable.”

Damjanovic said she could have used a few female role models before she decided to go for a Ph.D.

“I can’t say that I had clear goals or ideas about research when I was an undergraduate,” Damjanovic said. “Maybe if there was somebody to look up to, I would have gotten faster to where I am now.”