Abigail Derton

Undergraduate Student, University of Texas at Arlington

Abigail Derton is a senior at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) studying pure mathematics. Abigail is a Cherokee Indian and was homeschooled in Corinth, Texas. She joined UTA as a transfer student after studying civil engineering for two years at North Central Texas College (NCTC). Through working as a math tutor at both NCTC and UTA, Abigail grew her passion for mathematics. This passion persuaded her to change majors from civil engineering to pure mathematics in the Fall of 2017.

Abigail has participated in the S-STEM program at UTA (called SURGE) since the Fall of 2018 and is an active member of MAA. She attended the Field of Dreams Conference in 2018 where she developed an interest in mathematical biology. She is now a researcher in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) and is currently working on a project in computational neuroscience.

Recently, Abigail was accepted into the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Summer Research Program at Harvard, to take place in the Summer of 2019. Through this program, she hopes to learn how her quantitative skills can be applied to rising problems in biology. Her goal is to utilize her mathematical skills to progress medical understanding and thereby save and improve countless lives.