Professor Nate Brown

Research & Publications
Contact Nate BrownFellows & Students

(In)Equity in STEM Publications

 “I began to realize the culture of research mathematics is part of the problem. And I had happily participated, promoted, and benefitted from it for far too long. The way we think about talent, success, teaching — it’s all antiquated, self-serving, and exacerbates inequities instead of combatting them.”

– Professor Nate Brown

 

Papers

  • Brown, N., Johnson, R., Strayhorn, T., Pagoto, S.L., Waring, M. E., Palmer, L., Lewis, K. A, & Workman, D. (2022) Psychosocial impacts of #BlackLivesMatter protests and police killings on undergraduate students in STEM. College Teachers Record (to appear).
  • Brown, Nate; Topaz, Chad (2022). How STEM Faculty Can Fight Institutional Racism and Sexism. Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.
  • Hatfield, Neil; Brown, Nathanial; Topaz, Chad (2022). Do introductory STEM courses disproportionately drive minoritized students out of STEM Pathways?, PNAS Nexus, 1(4), pgac167.
  • Hatfield, Neil; Brown, Nathanial; Smith, Christian; Topaz, Chad (2022). Differential Impacts on NSTEM Graduation: Exploring a Multi-Institutional Database, Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME) Conference Proceedings.
  • Brown, Nathanial; Zipf, Sarah; Pagoto, Sherry; Waring, Molly; Hatfield, Neil; Palmer, Lindsay; Lewis, Kathrine; Workman, Deja (2021). Emergency Remote Instruction in 2020: Differential Impacts on STEM Students’ Confidence and Belonging, by Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Socioeconomic Status. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 7, p. 915789). Frontiers Media SA.
  • Pagoto, S.L., Lewis, K. A., Groshon, L., Palmer, L., Waring, M. E., Workman, D., De Luna, N., & Brown, N. (2021). STEM undergraduates’ perspectives of instructor and university responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. PLoS one, 16 (8).
  • Palmer, Lindsay; Pagoto, Sherry; Workman, Deja; Lewis, Kathrine; Rudin, Lauren; De Luna, Nina; Herrera, Valeria; Brown, Nathanial; Bibeau, Jessica; Arcangel, Kaylei; Waring, Molly (2020). Health and education concerns about returning to campus and online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic among US undergraduate STEM majors, The Journal of American College Health, DOI: 10.1080/07448481.2021.1979009
  • Cardel, M.I., Dhurandhar, E., Yarar-Fisher, C., Foster, M., Hidalgo, B., McClure, L.A., Pagoto, S., Brown, N., Pekmezi, D., Sharafeldin, N. and Willig, A.L. (2020). Turning chutes into ladders for women faculty: A review and roadmap for equity in academia. Journal of Women’s Health, 29(5), 721-733.

    Manuscripts Under Review

     

    • Lewis, Kathrine; Palmer, Lindsay; Waring, Molly; Brown, Nathanial; Pagoto, Sherry; Hatfield, Neil; Workman, Deja (2022). The personal is political: impacts of the US 2020 election on engagement of undergraduate LGBQ+ and heterosexual STEM students (submitted). 

    Math Publications

    “I study operator algebras. One common theme in my work is analogies and connections, primarily between C*- and W*-algebras, but also between C*-algebras and notions of dimension like topological covering dimension or asymptotic dimension. This has led to papers on entropy, dynamical systems, free probability, geometric and analytic group theory, numerical analysis, K-theory, and probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten.”

    – Professor Nate Brown

     

    Books

    Papers

      • Brown, Nathanial; Carrión, José; White, Stuart Decomposable approximations revisited, Operator algebras and applications: The Abel Symposium 2015. Abel Symposia 12, editors Carlsen, Larsen, Neshveyev and Skau, 45-59, Springer, 2016.
      • Brown, Nathanial On quasidiagonal C*-algebras, Operator algebras and applications, 19–64, Advanced Studies in Pure Mathematics, 38, Mathematical Society of Japan, Tokyo, (2004).
      • Brown, Nathanial; Dadarlat, Marius Extensions of quasidiagonal C*-algebras and K-theory, Operator algebras and applications, 65–84, Advanced Studies in Pure Mathematics, 38, Mathematical Society of Japan, Tokyo,(2004).
      • Brown, Nathanial; Germain, Emmanuel Dual entropy in discrete groups with amenable actions, Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems, 22 (2002), 711-728.
      • Brown, Nathanial; Dykema, Kenneth; Shlyakhtenko, Dimitri Topological entropy of free product automorphisms, Acta Mathematica, 189 (2002), 1-35.
      • Brown, Nathanial; Choda, Marie Approximation entropies in crossed products with an application to free shifts, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 198 (2001), 331-346.
      • Brown, Nathanial Topological entropy, embeddings and unitaries in nuclear quasidiagonal C*-algebras, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 128 (2000), 2603-2609.
      • Brown, Nathanial Crossed products of UHF algebras by some amenable groups, Hokkaido Mathematics Journal, 29 (2000), 201-211.
      • Brown, Nathanial Topological entropy in exact C*-algebras, Mathematische Annalen, 314 (1999), 347-367.
      • Brown, Nathanial; Dunfield, Nathan; Perry, Greg Colorings of the plane III, Geombinatorics, 3 (1994), 110-114.
      • Brown, Nathanial; Dunfield, Nathan; Perry, Greg Colorings of the plane II, Geombinatorics, 3 (1994), 64-74.
      • Brown, Nathanial; Dunfield, Nathan; Perry, Greg Colorings of the plane I, Geombinatorics, 3 (1993), 24-31.

       

      Researchers

      Nate Brown has advised three graduate students–Hung-Chang Liao, Aleksey Zelenberg, and Michael Tseng – as well as three postdocs–Sarah Browne, Jianchao Wu, and José Carrión.

      Hung Chang

      Graduate Student

      Hung-Chang received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Penn State in August 2016. He is currently a postdoc fellow and part-time professor at University of Ottawa. His main research interests are in the field of operator algebras and dynamical systems.

      Aleksey Zelenberg

      Graduate Student

      Aleksey Zelenberg received his PhD from Penn State in 2015. He is currently teaching mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Academically, his interests are in operator algebras and math education. He is also partially obsessed with reading fiction, cooking and eating, running, listening to blues, and watching epically good TV shows.

      Michael Tseng

      Graduate Student

      Michael Tseng is at the Department of Economics, University of Central Florida. He does teaching and research in financial economics and econometrics. He received a PhD in Mathematics from Penn State, on Rokhlin actions on AF C*-algebras, under the supervision of Professor Nate Brown.

      Sarah Browne

      Post Doctoral Fellow

      Sarah Browne obtained her PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2017, with Paul Mitchener. She was a postdoc at Penn State from 2017-2019, where she worked with Nate Brown on a project related to the Universal Coefficient Theorem. She is now an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Kansas. In addition to mathematics, she enjoys running, hiking and playing squash.

      Jianchao Wu

      Post Doctoral Fellow

      Jianchao Wu studies operator algebras and noncommutative geometry, two related areas that concern themselves with strange mathematical objects inspired by quantum mechanics. More precisely, his work has touched on noncommutative dimension theory, K-theory, higher-rank graphs, and coarse geometry, with connections to manifold topology and topological dynamics. He was a postdoc at Penn State from 2016-2019.

      José Carrión

      Post Doctoral Fellow

      José Carrión grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he learned to love mathematics and the ocean. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2013 and was a postdoc at Penn State for two years. He is now faculty in the Math Department at TCU, in Fort Worth, TX