About
I am an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at UWEC, and co-academic director at UWEC for the UW Online Collaboratives' Master's of Science in Data Science program. You can see my full Curriculum Vitae here. When I'm not doing math, I enjoy gardening, hiking, and reading.
My professional mission is to welcome diverse students into the math community by creating (1) engaging and supportive classrooms and (2) relevant and ethical research experiences.
Previously, I was a postdoc in electrical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Arizona State University, working with Dr. Jörg Kliewer and Dr. Oliver Kosut. I earned my Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln (UNL), working with Dr. Christine A. Kelley. I earned my B.A. in mathematics from Whitman College, and my M.S. in mathematics from UNL.
Teaching
In Fall 2025, I am teaching Calculus II (Math 215) and Algebra for Calculus (Math 109). Course materials for current students can be found on Canvas. Previous courses are listed below.
- Calculus I (S25)
- Programming for Data Science (S24, F24, S25)
- Computing in Python: Fundamentals and Procedural Programming (F24, S25)
- Discrete Mathematics (S21, F21, S22, S23, S24)
- Linear Algebra (F21, F23)
- Algebra for Calculus (F23)
- A Short Course in Calculus (S23, F23)
- Calculus II (F20, S21, S22, F22)
- Elementary Statistics (F20)
- Math Modeling (S18)
- Mathematics Matters (F17)
- College Algebra and Trigonometry (F16)
- College Algebra (F15, S16)
- Calculus for Management and Social Science (Su14)
- Calculus I (Su13, F13)
Research
My research interests are in error-correcting codes, secure and authentic communication, information privacy, graph-based codes and decoding algorithms, and applied discrete mathematics. I currently have two students in my undergraduate research group, and am a Math Alliance mentor. If you are a UWEC student interested in joining my group, please get in touch!
Recent Publications (undergraduate student collaborators marked with a *):
- A. Beemer, J. Bolkema. SASH: decoding community structure in graphs. To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Topics in Coding, Los Angeles, U.S., August 2025.
- D. Koepke*, M. Schnell*, M. St.Pierre*, A. Beemer. Authenticated partial correction over AV-MACs: toward characterization and coding. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, September 2024. Available at arXiv:2407.17582.
- M. Bakshi, S. Ghasvarianjahromi, Y. Yakimenka, A. Beemer, O. Kosut, and J. Kliewer. VALID: a validated algorithm for learning in decentralized networks with possible adversarial presence. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Athens, Greece, July 2024. Available at arXiv:2405.07316.
Recent Grants & Awards:
- Mathematical Congress of the Americas 2025 AMS Travel Grant ($1240), 2025.
- UWEC Student Faculty Research Grant (with B. Weston*), "Fast Algorithms for Computing Map Foldings" ($2299 student stipend), 2025.
- NSF CISE Collaborative Research Award (Co-PIs J. Kliewer and O. Kosut), "Do You Trust Me? Practical Approaches and Fundamental Limits for Keyless Authentication" ($300,000 UWEC; $1.2 million collaborative), 2021-2025.
- UWEC Student Faculty Research Grant (with M. Blong*), "Decoding Communities Among Indigenous Beaders" ($2000 student stipend), 2024.