Highlights of Purdue's VIGRE Program
The VIGRE program has been discontinued. Although these webpages are still made available for historical interest, the information available should be considered out of date.
The centerpiece of Purdue's VIGRE program is the VIGRE Liftoff Seminar. During the Fall semester, a wide array of lectures are given by Purdue faculty and visiting scholars about exciting avenues of research and career options. The seminar has enjoyed large attendance by undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty and has been a strong force for vertical integration of research in the two departments. It has also been a showcase for the fruitful interplay between mathematics and statistics.
Several speakers in the VIGRE Liftoff Seminar introduced the audience to research in such interdisciplinary topics as Bioinformatics, Statistical Genomics, Materials Science, and Computational Finance. Purdue has thriving research groups in these areas that bridge multiple departments. Undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs are being unabashedly enticed into these areas.
See VIGRE Liftoff Seminar for a list of talks, and VIGRE Seminar, Fall 2001 for a list of the most recent lectures with abstracts.
Social events after the seminar help to cement relationships across rank.
During the spring semester, the speakers in the Liftoff Seminar are graduate students and postdocs. This is a place where these young researchers can hone their communication skills. Lecturing about mathematics is an important aspect of the profession, whether in academics or industry.
The Liftoff seminar is so named because it is intended to have the effect of launching students toward our many weekly advanced research seminars. We have noticed as a side effect of the Liftoff seminar that our graduate students begin to attend more seminars sooner in their studies than before. Our weekly research seminars are centered around tightly knit groups of faculty and students. The Liftoff seminar has introduced students to many of the faculty participating in the advanced seminars and has made students realize that they are welcome in what traditionally has appeared to be a rather forbidding teritory.
To further encourage graduate students to participate in seminars and colloquia, the Math and Stat departments now offer students 1 hour of credit for each seminar that they conscientiously attend.
We are very proud of our VIGRE Program and we spell out every facet of the operation in our VIGRE third year self-assessment.
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