Dr. Alison Marr
- Email: marrasouthwestern.edu
- Southwestern University
- Status: Faculty
- Department: Math,
- Will Mentor: Pre-doctoral students
Areas of Expertise
Pure Mathematics,
Research Interests
Graph Theory
Bio
Alison Marr received her B.A. in Mathematics from Murray State University in 2002, her M.S. in Mathematics from Texas A&M University in 2004, and her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Southern Illinois University in 2007. She began working at Southwestern University in Fall 2007 and served as chair of the department from 2015-2018. She teaches a wide variety of math courses from Introduction to Statistics to Calculus to Linear Algebra to Algebraic Structures. She also enjoys teaching her First-Year Seminar course on television game shows and has co-taught a Paideia Seminar on Global Health twice. She incorporates many types of inquiry-based learning (IBL) into her classes and is heavily involved in the IBL math community serving on multiple conference planning committees and boards. She also helped co-develop the Southwestern University EQUIP (Embracing Quantitative Understanding and the Inquiry Process) program for entering STEM students that helps improve students quantitative skills and provides continual mentoring through their time at Southwestern.
She is an active researcher in the field of graph theory and is the co-author of the book,
Magic Graphs. She has given invited addresses across the United States and the world on her work and has 11 journal publications in the field. She recently completed a summer research project with two first-year students where they analyzed the structure of the
Choose Your Own Adventure interactive gamebook series using graph theory.
When shes not teaching or thinking about math, she enjoys running, playing the saxophone in the Southwestern Wind Ensemble, and spending time with her husband and their cat, Birthday.
