Anna Kucherova was born in Sacramento, California to a first-generation immigrant family and upon graduating as her high school’s valedictorian she was awarded the UC Regents’ Scholarship to attend the University of California, Merced. Anna is currently completing her 4thyear at UC Merced and in May 2020 she will be a first-generation college graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematical Sciences, with a focus on computation and data sciences.In the summer of 2019, Annawas given the opportunity to put her mathematics background into practice at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).Soon after this experience, Anna simultaneously took on two NSF-funded projects. Her first formal research experience was led byDr. Noemi Petrawhose research focuses on using available data to infer unknown or uncertain parameters in ice sheet flow models. The second data-enabled science program, DESCARTES, entailed solving a scheduling problem for the Merritt Writing ProgramofUC Merced. Anna continued working on the schedulingprojectthroughout the fallof 2019 and helped develop a novel parallelizable hybrid algorithm; she was awarded the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Undergraduate Travel Grant to present this researchat the JointMathematics Meetingsin January 2020.Beyond academics, Anna has established a strong relationship with the campus community by working as an Instructional Assistant at the Math Center and a Enrollment Services Peer Advisor at the Students First Center. Anna’sunique undergraduate journey has allowed herto work onmultiplerelevant real-world problems and findintersections between mathematics, othernatural sciences, and even social sciences. In the fall of 2020, Anna will be pursuing a Ph.D.in Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Merced.
