From September 2009 to July 2011, I was one of the project directors for the Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the Department of Mathematics. The Laboratory recruites a team of undergraduate students to work, under the direction of faculty members, on an applied problem provided by the sponsor of the project.
In the past, the sponsors included organizations such as the National Institute of Justice, Baltimore City Fire Department, Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management, and Science Applications International Corporation. The complete list (it is rather long: the AML had been running for more than 30 years!) is at the AML website .
The sponsoring organization for the project I directed was the Chemical Security Analysis Center established by the Department of Homeland Security. The goal of the project was to design a model to estimate road transport of industrial chlorine in the US from the available storage data.
In the course of the project, the students gave four formal end-of-semester presentations to the sponsors; two talks at the GMU Atmospheric Modeling Conference and a talk at the MAA Mathfest in 2010. We published the results of the study in the following paper:
Alexei Kolesnikov, Angel Kumchev, Dennis Howell, Patrick ONeill and Matthew Tiger, Estimation of the commodity flow of chlorine from storage data, Journal of Transportation Security. Volume 5 (Number 1, 2012), pp. 5168.