Selenne Bañuelos, an associate professor of mathematics at California State University, Channel Islands in Camarillo, California, recently won the Mathematical Association of America’s Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching. The award honors beginning college or university faculty whose teaching of undergraduate mathematics has been extraordinarily successful.
Dr. Bañuelos joined the faculty at CalState, Channel Islands in 2014. Her research interests lie in the fields of differential and difference equations, dynamical systems and its applications to mathematical biology. Her projects have been in multi-patch migration models, epidemiology, and the dynamics of sleep.
Dr. Bañuelos is committed to increasing access to higher education in STEM fields for women and historically underrepresented minorities. She remembers walking into her college math classes as an undergraduate and seeing no women of color as tenure-track faculty. “The STEM world can be very lonely for women, especially for a woman of color,” Dr. Bañuelos said. “You can feel like you don’t fit in. At that moment, I had not met a female in academia — especially a woman with children.”
Dr. Bañuelos is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she majored in mathematics. She holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Southern California.