The Graduate College is pleased to announce the winner of the 2020-2021 Outstanding Master's Thesis Award to Jo Martin, M.S., G’20. The Outstanding Master's Thesis Award recognizes exceptional work on behalf of a Master’s student, as demonstrated by their thesis, including significant contributions to their field of study.

Jo Martin grew up in the Midwest and graduated from Oberlin College in 2016 with a bachelor's degree in Geology.  After college she worked with the IS-GEO research coordination network where she researched interdisciplinary education at the intersection of earth and data science.  While passionate about earth science questions, Jo discovered a love of pure math, thanks to some excellent professors, and came to UVM in 2018 to pursue a master's degree in mathematics.

At UVM Jo worked as a teaching assistant in the Geology Department and began research in graph theory with Professor Puck Rombach.  In her master's research she looked at how global graph properties influence a new graph property, the guessing number, which is related to information flow through networks, and is a very fun guessing game.  Jo is currently living and working in Burlington and is excited about the prospect of having continued fun with math for the rest of her life.