Rosa Orellana facts for kids
Rosa C. Orellana is an American mathematician. She studies special types of math called algebraic combinatorics and representation theory. She teaches math as a professor at Dartmouth College.
Early Life and Learning
Rosa loved math from a young age. One of her elementary school teachers noticed how excited she was about numbers. She went to California State University, Los Angeles. She was the first person in her family to earn a college degree!
During her college years, she did summer research. She worked with Kenneth Millett at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They studied knot theory, which looks at how knots can help us understand things like DNA.
Rosa earned her highest degree, a Ph.D., in 1999. She got this degree from the University of California, San Diego. She first wanted to keep studying knot theory. But her professor went on leave. So, she changed her focus to algebraic combinatorics. Her big research paper was about a topic called "The Hecke Algebra of Type B."
Her Career in Math
After getting her Ph.D., Rosa worked as a researcher. She was at the University of California, San Diego. In 2000, she joined Dartmouth College as a special fellow.
At Dartmouth, she won an award for her amazing research. It was called the John M. Manley Huntington Memorial Award. She also helped start the Dartmouth group for the Association for Women in Mathematics. This group helps women in math.
Rosa also created special "Sonia Kovalevsky Math Days." These events encourage school girls to keep studying math. She is also on an important board for a math research center called ICERM. From 2020 to 2022, she was a council member for the American Mathematical Society (AMS).
