Name: Vincent Fiorino
Major(s): ACMS and Theology
Research Location: Notre Dame and Indianapolis
Vincent spent his summer working with Professor Alan Lindsay doing computational mathematics. He describes his project this way: "Say you have two cells (like in biology): cell A and cell B some distance apart from each other. At point A we release 10000 particles that move around randomly. Eventually some of these particles will reach point B at some times, which we call passage times. By running a simulation of this above example numerous times, I was trying to see how effective these passage times are in letting cell B predict how far away it is from cell A. This process of releasing particles that move around sporadically is known as diffusion and is how cells communicate in real life. To put this in an analogy, my research is similar to how one can flip a coin 100 times and figure out if the coin is weighted/rigged by how many times the coin lands on heads."
Vincent says, "As someone heavily considering graduate school, I knew I needed to get my feet wet with what actual research entails. As I mentioned before, Professor Lindsay and his work was the perfect blend of math with biological context that drew me in."