Our Team

Bio

Dr. Egon Schulte is a professor in mathematics at Northeastern. His main areas of expertise include Discrete and Combinatorial Geometry, Combinatorics, and Group Theory, and his recent teaching activities have focused on graduation education and the supervision of PhD students.

Dr. Schulte witnessed Bridge to Calculus grow from a small outreach program for Boston area high-school students, launched by his former colleague, Bob Case, about 25 years ago, to a vibrant program of modest size based on an alliance between Northeastern University’s Mathematics Department and the Boston Public Schools. The program is as much about college access for underserved high-school students as it is about Calculus and mathematics!

Dr. Schulte has been instrumental in enhancing Bridge to Calculus, including implementing the Math Question Center that support students throughout the academic year.

Bio

After being rescued from failing eight-grade mathematics by an inspiring algebra teacher Professor Porter went on to receive his PhD in mathematics from Yale university. At Northeastern, he has served as Vice President of Cooperative Education and Chair of the Mathematics Department as well as professor of mathematics.

Professor Porter’s research focuses on algebraic constructions related to geometric problems and then using the algebraic constructions to solve geometric problems. He has given invited lectures on his mathematics research throughout the country and Europe. He has been visiting professor at the Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille, France; the University of Sussex England, and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, Germany.

Through his teaching, his work in support of cooperative education, and a multiyear grant from the Science Science Foundation to promote the excitement of research and discovery for first-year college students, Professor Porter aims to encourage and support students to shape their future through learning. This is a critical goal of the Bridge to Calculus program, and he is honored to be a member of the team.

Bio

Rajini Jesudason teaches mathematics at Northeastern University and directs Northeastern Math Departments signature outreach program, Bridge to Calculus, which has been running in partnership with Boston Public Schools for over 25 years. In the past, Raj was Program Director in Mathematics, serving the Boston Public Schools. Raj has taught and worked closely with teachers in the Boston, Cambridge and Watertown Public School districts, and has played a leading role in state initiatives for asset-based instruction and teacher development in mathematics education.

Raj’s experience in higher education includes serving as a Dean of Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering at Foothill Community College in California, teaching QuantitativeReasoning and Pre-Calculus mathematics at Harvard University, co-implementing a Quantitative Reasoning Program at Wellesley College, and teaching in the teacher education programs both at UMass Boston and Wheelock Colleges.

Raj has presented her work at regional conferences, including the Southern California Community College Consortium, MathWest conference in Massachusetts, Quantitative Literacy Consortium of the Northwest, BU’s Aframath conference and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government’s Black Policy conference.

Bio

Tony Iarrobino is a professor in Northeastern’s Department of Mathematics. He has expertise in algebraic geometry, commutative rings and their deformations, commuting nilpotent matrices, families of points on a variety, gorenstein algebras, and singularities of maps.

Bio

Beth Qudah is the budget coordinator for the Math Department at Northeastern University. She has also involved with Bridge to Calculus for over a decade and has supported the program and watched it grow. She is delighted to see it take root and to be such an integral part of it.

Bio

Rekha Bai received the PhD in Mathematics from the University of Iowa. In addition to teaching, Dr. Bai is a Bridge to Calculus Committee Member, assisting in community outreach activities and volunteering for Calculus Field Day. She has also coordinated and assisted in developing Calculus for Business and Economics courses across our global university, such as NUin locations.

Bio

Oana Veliche is a teaching professor in the Mathematics Department. She joined Northeastern University in 2010 as a part-time instructor and in 2013 as a full-time instructor. At Northeastern she teaches not only a variety of undergraduate courses (mostly upper level) but also graduate courses (e.g. Optimization and Complexity). Some of the courses she teaches, as for example Introduction to Cryptography and Commutative Algebra, were designed and introduced by her in the Mathematics curriculum.

She also teaches graduate courses in her research areas: Commutative and Homological Algebra. Moreover, Oana is actively publishing research papers, giving research presentations, and organizing conference sessions.

Between 2009 and 2023 she served as a volunteer Middle-School teacher at Saint Herman Christian School in Allston, MA. There, she introduced and taught a proof based Geometry course for each one of the grades 6th – 8th. In addition, she trained students to participate in the MATHCounts competitions.

During summer 2019, she served as a Lead Instructor for the Bridge to Calculus program. She rejoins the Bridge to Calculus Team as a Curriculum advisor.

Bio

Mr. Howland has an extensive history with Boston Public Schools (BPS), as a “homegrown” student educated in the district grades K-12. Mr. Howland is a graduate of Boston Latin School (BLS) and worked in BPS for almost five decades as a teacher and administrator. He has served as headmaster of Another Course to College, an administrator in charge of discipline at the former Jamaica Plain High School, and head of the math department at The English High School.

Additional Mr. Howland served as associate headmaster at his alma mater BLS. More recently, in the winter of the 2018-19 school year, Mr. Howland filled in as interim head of school at Boston Latin Academy. A veteran math teacher and an attorney who has long instructed students in law and in mock trials, he has earned Boston’s “Golden Apple” and the Massachusetts “Teacher of the Year” awards. He was also nominated as a finalist for “National Teacher of the Year.”

Bio

A proud Bridge to Calculus alum, Chiruza Peter Muhimuzi moved to Boston as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019 and graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in biology. He is the founder of Chiruza-Charity, a nonprofit supporting more than 200 refugees, orphans, and underprivileged students in Uganda and the DRC, and serves as co-chair of the Patient Advocate Council at Boston Medical Center. He now works at Vertex and aspires to become a physician bridging clinical practice and innovative research.