Bio:
Ronald has served as the AY 2023-2024 undergraduate representative of the SIAM Student Chapter at UC Merced. Through this role, Ronald has consistently demonstrated exceptional leadership and dedication to the STEM community. The SIAM Student Chapter at UC Merced facilitates many events on campus for the undergraduate community, from fun activities such as derivative and integration bees to career-oriented resume workshops. Moreover the chapter offers opportunities for students to learn about and experience research through the Applied Math Challenge, in which teams of undergraduate students attempt to solve a mathematical research problem over spring break and the chapter also hosts the Central Valley Regional SIAM Student Chapter Conference in late Spring. This conference, attended by nearly 10 institutions greater than 100 individuals, involves a poster session for students to present their work, a keynote talk featuring information about research and careers in mathematics, and some fun mathematics-related games. Ronald has been heavily involved in the planning of these events and often serves as a liaison between the other SIAM Student Chapter officers (all graduate students) and the undergraduate community.
Ronald started conducting undergraduate research in Spring 2023. Ronald's research concerns machine learning techniques for whole slide imaging (WSI) for gastrointestinal cancer classification. In particular, Ronald is developing self-supervised models for distinguishing microsatellite stabilities from patches obtained from WSIs. For this research, Ronald implemented contrastive learning techniques coupled with multiple instance learning for classifying data from the Colorectal Cancer and the Stomach Adenocarcinoma datasets. Using the metrics Area Under the ROC curves and F1 scores, Ronald's proposed approach compares favorably with existing state-of-the-art methods. Ronald wrote a conference manuscript, for which he is the first author, that was submitted to the 2024 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society International Conference. Ronald is a highly motivated student who is very talented and is always seeking to challenge himself. His programming skills are some of the strongest I have seen among the many undergraduate students I have encountered here. He is also a responsible, independent, and dedicated member of my lab.
The entire Applied Mathematics Departments enthusiastically supports Ronald Nap’s nomination for the “Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award” for his academic performance, achievements in research and for his contribution to the UC Merced Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Student Chapter.
