NSERC CGS-M Recipient
Every year, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada endows NSERC scholarships to universities across Canada in order to fund highly qualified graduate students throughout their research program. At the master’s level, the University of Regina receives four endowments from NSERC that is used to recognize and support the exceptional research being conducted by four distinguished graduate students. This year, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics is excited to announce Layne Burns has earned one of these 2024 Canadian Graduate Scholarship - Master’s (CGS-M) awards!
Layne is a Cree man from James Smith Cree Nation, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Science Honours in Mathematics from the First Nations University of Canada in the Spring 2024 semester. During his undergraduate program, Layne was the recipient of two NSERC USRA awards in which he studied multiple aspects of Indigenous mathematics including the Peach Stone Bowl Game, Natural Language Processing (NLP) with respect to Indigenous languages, and the creation of Pangrams (sentences that use every letter of the alphabet) with Dr. Edward Doolittle. Their work on the Peach Stone Bowl Game will be presented by Layne at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle in 2025!
As a result of his undergraduate research involving statistical methods, his master’s research will focus on studying configurations in graphs and how they change over time subject to certain rules or constraints. Such problems fall under the heading of graph dynamical systems and have applications in network optimization as they capture a wide range of processes on a given graph or network by combining statistical techniques with graph theory. Some well studied examples along these lines are graph pebbling, zero forcing, and Markov chains, which are of particular interest to Layne.
Congratulations, Layne! The department is very excited to learn more about your research as you progress through your master’s program!