When Mayowa Olawoyin was ten years old, she loved to play school with her friends and be a pretend teacher, happily writing down problems and giving her students homework. The subject was always math.

It was in high school that she figured out that a lot of people don’t really ‘get’ math. So, she was able to explain it to other students. She wanted to help people that don’t understand the subject to see it in a different light.

Today Mayowa is a second year graduate student with an honors degree in mathematics. She graduated in May 2015 and received the Torgeson Bridge fellowship the following summer. Now her focus is research in mathematical biology, which is useful for understanding organic processes with equations. Continue reading