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Tell us about your background.

I'm a mathematician by trade and I went to »ÆÉ«Ö±²¥. I did my undergraduate, a BSc honours in math, a master's in math, and then a PhD in math. I was just down the street in the Chase Building. I grew up in the Halifax area, Bedford more specifically, and I worked a little bit at Saint Mary's teaching part-time. I also taught part-time online at the University of Winnipeg during the pandemic. And for the last three years I've been at St. Francis Xavier University, teaching there.  

What do you look forward to most about being back at Dal?

I have had the privilege of working every July at »ÆÉ«Ö±²¥ with , which offers a STEAM and entrepreneurship program for grade 10 and 11 students at university campuses across Canada. That was my first exposure to the Faculty of Management. I've always kept a »ÆÉ«Ö±²¥ connection by coming back every summer and working with Shad. In some ways it felt like I didn't really leave. And then, in other ways, it's exciting to be back. Every September is exciting. Like there's this surge of energy, on any university campus.  

One of the exciting things in the faculty is that a lot of the people are doing interdisciplinary work. I've run into engineers, computer scientists, other mathematicians, physicists, people who were in the finance and trading world and then came to academia. I'm just happy to be part of such a welcoming and diverse faculty.

What do you love about math?

Math has an elegance to it that I think is hard to convey. In high school and lower levels where you need to do the front work, it’s hard to see. But I think one of the things that really attracted me to studying it was the different insights you can get on the same problem. Viewing it through slightly different lenses. I have a colleague who’s a professor in the math department here at Dal. But he came for his PhD, out of philosophy. I am really interested in this kind of interdisciplinary work in general. I think when you bring different viewpoints and perspectives to a problem, you appreciate it. Even if you don't solve it, you appreciate it in a different way and you see different things about it.

Tell us about the new Resource Centre you’re starting in room 2068.

The intention is to create a place where anyone in the Faculty can come. It'll be a place to work, to meet other people, and to get help. Our goal is to eventually have help for anything housed in the Faculty, and it will be a central hub for accessing that help. But it is also a space where you can work and meet others working on similar things and collaborate. 

The Undergraduate Advising Office (UAO) is hosting Learn and Connect in this room for the upcoming academic year, which is wonderful to see. Ideally, there would be an online component to this as well. It’s not unfair to say that it's modeled after similar things that happen across the university already. The Department of Math and Statistics has a resource learning centre. The Faculty of Computer Science has one as well.