About
Education
B.A. in Mathematics (with Honors) and Statistics - Williams College (2018)
M.S. in Applied & Interdisciplinary Mathematics - University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (2020)
Complex Systems Graduate Certificate - University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (2020)
About
Daniel Maes is a graduate student in applied mathematics at the University of Michigan, supported by the Marjorie Lee Browne Scholars Program. Daniel received a dual B.A. in mathematics and statistics from Williams College, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. During his time at Williams, he was the founding head advising fellow for the Williams chapter of Matriculate, whose mission is “to empower high-achieving, low-income high school students to make the leap to our best colleges and universities.” Based on his honors thesis work, which modeled the college admissions pipeline with a focus on assessing critical mass in affirmative action, Daniel won an Outstanding Presentation Award from the Mathematical Association of America at MathFest 2018. Finally, for his achievements in applied mathematics during his undergraduate years, Daniel was awarded the Williams College Morgan Prize for Achievement in Applied Mathematics.
Daniel is also a partner of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity whose goal is to fuse the efforts of humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists with those of mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists through the use of cutting-edge quantitative techniques to increase inclusion, diversity, and equity.
For his Master's, Daniel worked in the Valdovinos Lab in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Department to model the anthropogenic effects on, and the stability of, ecological networks in contexts such as mutualistic pollination networks and/or fisheries.
In his current doctoral work, Daniel works in the Ostling Lab in the EEB Department at Michigan in conjunction with the Department of Integrative Biology and the Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation covers the role of intransitive competition loops on the coexistence of ecological communities.
Research
Some areas Daniel has conducted research in:
- Social Systems (assessing affirmative action policies in the U.S.)
- Mathematical Ecology (population dynamics, theory of mutualisms)
- Epidemiology (SIR modeling and its variants)
- Mathematical Finance (optimal investment strategies for LETFs)
