E-RISE SMRE: Behind the Design​

As per tradition, student participants of the Guam NSF EPSCoR E-RISE Summer Math Research Experience (SMRE) design a t-shirt for the program to wear on Final Presentation day. This year’s design was a collaborative effort by Angel Samaniengo, Liberal Studies and Human Services major at Guam Community College, and Jay Redila, Civil Engineering major at the University of Guam. Gain some insight on the creation of this year’s design, straight from the source.

Angel: My research deals with ecological networks of coral bacteriome communities, while the work that Jay’s team did aligns with the application of machine learning and statistics to the corals we studied, so we wanted to reflect that somehow.

We went with a brown/purple/yellow color palette as a homage to the color morphologies of Porites cylindrica and lobata, which are the specific reef-building coral species we looked at.

In “SMRE,” I replaced the last letter with an uppercase sigma symbol, which is a summation notation. As for the back design, I think Jay did something really clever by enclosing the design within brackets. It’s supposed to be a subtle homage to adjacency matrices, which are essentially 2D arrays of 1’s and O’s meant to show which of the coral’s bacterial families were strongly connected, before network construction.

This was a really exciting program because for a lot of us, it was our first exposure to math research. I’m really happy to have played a part in the design process and I love that this shirt acts as memorabilia for what a blast this summer research experience was.