Sarah Cannon

Assistant Professor of
Mathematics and Computer Science

Department of Mathematical Sciences
Claremont McKenna College

scannon[at]cmc.edu

Pitzer College student Charlotte Richards won an Honorable Mention in the Association for Women in Mathematics Student Essay Contest for an essay she wrote based on an interview with me, titled "Random Walks for Representation".

I was on Junior Research Leave in Fall 2023, spending part of the semester at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (MSRI) as part of the Algorithms, Fairness, and Equity Program.

I reviewed the book "All the Math You Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School)" by Thomas Garrity for the June/July 2023 issue of the AMS Notices.

For 2023-2024, I was elected Secretary of the SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics.

In Fall 2022, I taught a special topics class at Claremont McKenna College on the Math of Political Districting (Math 195); course materials will be made available by Summer 2023 for anyone considering teaching a similar course.

In Spring 2021, I was awarded an NSF grant "CRII: AF: RUI: Markov Chains and Random Sampling on Graphs." More information about the grant and my plans for it can be found in this CMC news article.

In September 2019, I was an invited by the National Academy of Sciences to the Japanese-American-German Frontiers of Science Symposium in Kyoto, Japan. I spoke about "Collective Intelligence via Markov Chains and Emergent Phenomena."

In Fall 2019, I started as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Claremont McKenna College, a liberal arts college in Claremont, CA.

In Summer 2019, I was in Boston for the Voting Rights Data Institute at Tufts and MIT, where I worked on applications of Markov chain sampling algorithms to the problem of political redistricting while supervising multiple student projects.

In Spring 2019, I was part of the Geometry of Polynomials program at the Simons Institute.

Quanta magazine featured some of my research in their article "Smart Swarms Seek New Ways to Cooperate."

Read about why I chose Georgia Tech and my Ph.D. experience there in this Georgia Tech Computer Science News Article.

My adviser Dana Randall and I were featured in the Summer 2017 issue of the Gerogia Tech Alumni Magazine; check out the online version.

I was a panelist at the 2016 IEEE/WIE Women's Leadership Summit, where Georgia Tech had a strong presence.

My paper "A Markov Chain Algorithm for Compression in Self-Organizing Particle Systems" with Joshua Daymude, Dana Randall, and Andrea Richa was featured on Godel's Lost Letter and P=NP, a prominent theory blog. Check it out for an explanation of the model, the result, and some interesting connections to soft robotics.

I spoke about about diversity and my experience at Georgia Tech in a video titled "Diversity at Georgia Tech: Faces of Inclusive Excellence," published by the Office of Institute Diversity.

Funding for the first two years of my Ph.D. came from the Clare Boothe Luce Foundation, and I was featured twice in their newletter Momentum alongside other female scientists - in April 2015 and May 2014.