Peg Howland is our Guidant Fellowship Recipient for the 2001-2002 academic year. Peg is a 5th year Ph.D. student who expects to complete her dissertation by the end of the summer. Peg received her B.S. in Mathematics with highest honors from Purdue University as well as her M.S. in Mathematics with an option in Computer Science. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa while at Purdue. She first came to Minnesota between her junior and senior years to attend an NSF Undergraduate Research Participation program at Macalester College. She also interned at Control Data that summer and really enjoyed her time here. After completing her M.S., she came back to Minnesota to work for Control Data and then later for Honeywell. Her love for academia, however, led her back to school and the Ph.D. program at the U of M. She is working with Professor Haesun Park applying numerical linear algebra to information retrieval. Her thesis topic is Structure Preserving Dimension Reduction of Text Data. Her career goals include university teaching and research. We congratulate her on her excellent work and are proud to have her as one of our doctoral candidates.

-Georganne Tolaas