Instructor Spotlight: Dr. Paquin
Dr. Dana Paquin is the current Discrete Mathematics and Lattice Point Geometry instructor; she previously taught mathematics at OHS ten years ago. Outside of OHS, she is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and conducts research on the mathematics of medical imaging and mathematical modeling of leukemia.
Since she was a young child, Dr. Paquin has been captivated by the problem solving and pattern recognition associated with mathematics. “I think what may be one of the most, you know, interesting or kind of beautiful parts of math is really identifying patterns that emerge in all kinds of different places and using pattern recognition to develop connections between different areas of math—for example, starting with a problem that seems to be a number theory problem and then turning it into a graph theory problem or vice versa,” Dr. Paquin shares.
For high school, Dr. Paquin attended the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, where she took many university-level math courses that fueled her long-term interest in math. After high school, Dr. Paquin studied math at Davidson College in North Carolina. In her first year of college, she began tutoring for single-variable and multivariable calculus. “I really loved working with students and thinking about how to ask questions in a leading way that would help students figure out how to solve the problem on their own rather than just saying like, ‘Here’s what we do,’” Dr. Paquin recounts of her experience tutoring in college, which got her interested in teaching. She had a similar experience as a teaching assistant for math courses in graduate school; she liked working closely with students and helping them realize that math was not just about memorizing facts.
As for her research interests, Dr. Paquin became interested in medical imaging during her graduate school years at Stanford. As a graduate student in mathematics, she started out working in number theory and decided to sit in on a graduate course in partial differential equations. The instructor of the course was doing research in applications of mathematics to problems in medicine and biology, and Dr. Paquin became fascinated by some of his work. He connected her with researchers at the Stanford Medical Center to work on problems in medical imaging, and Dr. Paquin began working with medical images and mathematical modeling. “It became really interesting to […take] a problem that seems to be very applied in nature and then turning it and seeing how advanced mathematics can help with such an applied problem,” she notes.
After finishing her PhD thesis on the mathematics of medical imaging, Dr. Paquin taught number theory and math olympiad topics for the Summer Institutes through Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies, soon leading her to teach at OHS. Now, she teaches a full range of courses at Cal Poly, and while she teaches high school students through venues like Art of Problem Solving, she wanted to get back into working directly with high school students through OHS. “My main teaching position is at Cal Poly, but I really enjoy working with high school students, especially high school students that are interested in transitioning to more advanced math, so going from computational-style math—calculus and things like that—to more advanced theoretical and abstract math,” Dr. Paquin says of her interest in teaching at OHS.
This past school year, Dr. Paquin returned to OHS to teach the Discrete Mathematics and Lattice Point Geometry courses, providing students with a “pathway to think about more theoretical—more advanced—concepts […] to illustrate to students that there’s a broad range of mathematical concepts out there.” While high school mathematics often seems like a linear progression, the new courses give students an opportunity to work with topics and ideas outside of the traditional sequence.
Outside of mathematics, Dr. Paquin enjoys learning about foreign languages and cultures, recalling that she had originally planned to major in French and math when she first entered college. “I think that’s actually related to math because it’s pattern recognition in many ways, which is what I think is sort of amongst the fundamental components of doing math,” Dr. Paquin notes.
Having lived in Geneva twice and typically spending summers in Greece, Dr. Paquin has immersed herself in a variety of different cultures. She notes that alongside being great for developing language skills, experiencing different places and cultures is a lot of fun.
“During one of those times, my oldest son, who at the time was two, went to preschool at CERN, which is the particle physics lab in Geneva,” Dr. Paquin recounts of one particular experience in Geneva. “[It] was a lot of fun to see a preschool in the midst of all these super high-level physicists and engineers.” In addition, she could easily travel by train to a variety of places in Europe from Geneva because it was so centrally located.
In her free time, Dr. Paquin enjoys swimming—particularly open-water swimming—along with surfing and hiking. Around Stanford, she has swum from Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Treasure Island in San Francisco.
For OHS students, Dr. Paquin has the following advice: “Find something that you’re interested in and pursue it with passion! Explore different languages and cultures when you can, and look for ways to make connections with one another.”