10 minute read
Weaving a Web
Math professor has stitched together a lasting legacy at her alma mater
MARY MARTIN
Total funding: $7.04 million
photos by J. Intintoli
by Drew Ruble
Few if any professors on the MTSU campus have the kind of True Blue ties that Mathematics Professor Mary Martin possesses.
Martin’s mother taught on the MTSU campus in the College of Education and for almost a decade was graduate school dean.
“So I was on the MTSU campus pre-college and through college,” said Martin, a 1984 alumna of the University.
“I wasn’t born in Murfreesboro, but I grew up here.”
Following her graduation from MTSU, Martin went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina. Her first job out of college was at Colgate University in New York.
“That was a wonderful job, but it was too far away and too cold,” said Martin, who then relocated back south to Winthrop University in South Carolina as a math professor and director of the Honors program. She eventually returned to her alma mater as a faculty member in 1998.
A lot has changed at MTSU since her return to campus 24 years ago, not to mention since she was a kid walking the campus with her mother in the 1970s.
“I remember one day a couple of years ago, I came walking out of one of the buildings and I had to pause a moment to orient myself as to where I was, because everything in sight was brand new,” she said. “I’m very proud of how the University has grown, and I think that’s one thing that feeds my determination is that I know what MTSU can do. I’ve seen what it has done personally with my own eyes. I’m very grateful to MTSU for my undergraduate degree and the high level of instruction I received at the time.
“You can come out of MTSU with absolutely the best degree possible in the world. MTSU has the resources, and if you maximize them, you can go as far as you want to go.”
Martin has contributed to MTSU’s growth in profound ways as one of the most prolific grant writers on the faculty, penning (with her peers) proposals that have resulted in millions of dollars in funding coming to the MTSU campus for math- and teaching-related endeavors. She also helped steer MTSU’s mathematics program to become the diverse and modern program it is today, with connections reaching into many of the most relevant degree programs on campus.
MATH 2.0
Martin personifies the old adage that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Her expertise—math and teacher education— strongly resembles the professional talents possessed by her aforementioned mother as well as her father, an electrical engineer who worked for
Westinghouse troubleshooting obstacles on interstate and coal mine projects.
“He was a technical person,” Martin said. “A problem-solving type person.”
That’s a skill at the heart of the complex mathematics Martin teaches.
The study of math has evolved considerably since Martin’s re-arrival on campus in 1998. MTSU’s Mathematical Sciences Department now supports three Ph.D. programs that are significantly math— none of which qualifies as pure math. There’s computational math, which is applied math; math education—Martin’s grant-writing focus—which develops innovative teaching strategies; and data science, a new field and current darling of industry.
“The Ph.D. programs are aimed at new science,” Martin said. “The intersection of two or more fields. It’s math and education. It’s math and computation. It’s math and data analysis. That’s where all the new science comes from, and the reason it comes about is because of partnerships. Ideas and fields of study merge into a new kind of material. And that is very exciting. It’s also where you get a lot of new results.”
Take linear algebra, for instance, which is a course Martin teaches. Developed by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and economists, the field evolved when those various interests realized they were working on the same problems in their respective silos. Together, they developed a new structure.
“In my linear algebra classes now, I have Computer Science majors, Mechatronics Engineering majors, Mathematics majors, Physics majors, and Economics majors,” Martin said. “I’ve also had a couple of Accounting majors and Data Science majors. And they’re all there for a different reason.
“Those are the people that are going to be doing research quickly because they’re going back to their own fields and taking this computational technique to apply to the problems they’re trying to solve.”
The MTSU math department has served as the springboard and support system for all of these new and popular degree programs. These new lines of study are not just tentative connections anymore, Martin said. They’re more like “muscle and bone connections” to traditional math studies, which have transformed how the math department views itself (and how the University views the math department.)
“Think of the math department as having spider web connections to all these different branches of mathematics,” Martin explained. “You’re pulling tendrils and major support structure from all these different ancillary pieces, and that is where science is growing.
“So the math department isn’t getting math majors only. . . . The sign of a good, well-developed, modern math department is this growth into these other areas, which takes away from your primary visibility, but not the strength of the structure nor the necessity for the structure.”
DOLLARS AND SENSE
In support of such studies, Martin is the primary investigator behind millions in federal grants coming to MTSU to support math teacher training, preparation, and student support.
“The earliest grants were used to make sure that teachers were up to speed on best practices, doing cross-disciplinary activities in math and science, especially for students going through the middle school to high school transition, which is where you lose a lot of STEM students . . . due to the level of rigor in mathematics,” Martin said. “We were raising the intuition and perspective of the teachers, who could then teach and help students get over those stumbling blocks.”
Martin estimates those early grants impacted more than 6,000 teachers over a three-year period.
Figuring that each of those 6,000 teachers spent just five years in the field, and worked with a mere 100 students each, those grants impacted (minimally) tens of thousands of individual students.
“That’s a really big impact,” Martin said. “And all of these teachers were in Tennessee. We worked with teachers from every county in the state.”
An example of a more recent grant Martin acquired (worth $1.5 million in federal dollars) is called an Upward Bound grant, serving the needs of students
in 10th grade through their transition to college. This particular project is focused not so much on math, but rather on getting students graduated and prepared for college (meaning activities like tutoring and paperwork preparation assistance).
Multimillion dollar grants like the ones Martin has captured through the years aren’t just lying around on the ground waiting to be scooped up. Landing them requires incredible amounts of time and expertise, and there’s a lot of competition.
“You’ve got to make sure that you’re ready to go before you even hear about the funding, because by the time you hear about the funding for something like an Upward Bound grant, you’ll maybe
have two months to write a 600- to 1,000-page document that’s full of data and tightly constructed to meet every guideline,” she said. Given her status as a leader in her field, Martin commonly cultivates great opportunities that can benefit MTSU. The $1.5 million Upward Bound grant serves as an example, as Martin landed the grant through a relationship and synergy that she built with the Texas Instruments Educational Foundation.
“I had done two or three regional and two national training sessions for them, where they teach teachers about what’s coming out next on their equipment,” Martin explained. “So they said, ‘You know, you’ve hosted these workshops for us—we’d like to help you and get a grant writer to work with you who has experience with Upward Bound.’ ” Such an incredible offer dramatically cut the time Martin needed to write the grant, allowing her to focus on plugging in the local information and forging a partnership with the MTSU Office of Student Success to optimize the proposal.
Even with a big head start, Martin stressed that she relies on a team of grant writers, budget specialists, and other highly trained educators campuswide.
“I am so grateful to everyone who ever worked on a grant with me. And there are a lot of them at MTSU,” Martin said. “Especially when you get tired or your class schedule heats up or your grading load gets really deep, someone else on the team can keep things moving forward. Success breeds success, Martin said. Winning a big grant like the Upward Bound grant makes things a little less daunting going forward.
“Upward Bound stacks toward the experienced,” she explained. “So now we’re in the experienced category, which means keeping this grant will be easier than getting the first one.”
WOMAN ON A MISSION
With so much accomplished, what keeps Martin working so hard to secure new opportunities? Martin said math education is desperately needed, and she can’t fathom resting on her laurels.
“When Texas Instruments said that they would help me, I went looking at some of the data, and some of the data is so appallingly bad,” Martin said. “The graduation proficiency of students in mathematics in some of the affected schools is 12%. That means 12% of the students who graduate from some of those high schools actually are successful to be baseline math students—not advanced, not super proficient—they just made the baseline.”
Despite her ongoing and time-consuming mission to improve math education, Martin nevertheless made time to serve a recent term as the faculty representative to the MTSU Board of Trustees, the University’s governing body.
“I know what MTSU is capable of,” Martin said. “I’m very passionate about doing whatever I can from my position as a faculty member to continue to support its growth and success.”
Martin acknowledges that her service to the Board of Trustees required a reallocation of her work focus since time is finite.
“I have an incredible team that makes my work possible,” Martin said. “They are always there, telling me, ‘I need this data,’ so I could rearrange my schedule like puzzle pieces to get the information needed so that I didn’t slow the project down. I could trust them to continue to build the puzzle, to construct the grant, as long as I kept feeding it.”
HANDS-ON APPROACH
So, what does Martin like to do with the few spare hours she does have to herself?
“I knit. I crochet. I do eight different kinds of embroidery,” said the math-minded Martin (who also sings in her church choir).
Actually, Martin works on 12 types of needlework: cross-stitch, needlepoint, drawn thread, hardanger, classic embroidery, Berlin work (a type of needlepoint), bargello, blackwork, beaded embroidery, crewel, Japanese rozashi, and Hungarian embroidery. And that’s in addition to yarn work, including crochet, knitting, and macrame.
The seasoned knitter has used a similarly hands-on approach to teaching and grant writing, weaving together an impressive list of accomplishments.
