Janine Janoski (Math '06) has been honored with one of seven Undergraduate Thesis Awards. In making the announcement, Sr. Associate Dean George Watson comments, "Your thesis represents a strong contribution resulting from your research and your nominators were enthusiastic about your research endeavors to date and your prospect for continuted contributions." Prof. John Pelesko served as Ms. Janoski's thesis advisor. In her thesis, Janine investigated the question of how many ways a domino board can be tiled by domino's and monimo's in such a way that no two monimo's are adjacent. This problem connects in a non-trivial way to both pure and applied mathematics. In the pure direction, her work connects to the well-known Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, and generalizes the Fibonacci sequence in a novel and interesting way. In the applied direction, her work is motivated by packing problems arising in the study of nanoscale biomedical devices. As her thesis work lies at the intersection of both pure and applied areas its potential impact is quite large. Janine has posed and solved new problems in combinatorics, has made several interesting conjectures that point the way forward for future researchers in this area, and has clarified some of the effects of boundary conditions on the random packing problem of interest to nanoscience researchers. Ms. Janoski is a member of a large community of undergraduate researchers working with faculty mentors within the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

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