The environment and vibe of a community is based on the people who make it come alive. Campersand values and prioritizes its community. They are the ones who teach, model, and mentor our kids to play, ponder, and reflect on their potential. Our community supports the campers, challenging them to stretch and challenge, while still reminding them to be playful.
We are back to teaching and playing in-person. There is a unique dynamic that occurs in the classroom. The campers, the faculty, and community thrive on these interactions that spark conversations, curiosity, and excitement. We’re still adjusting to the post pandemic norms. We’ve heard many of you have grown (a bit) but are ready for some new material & old fashion classroom fun.
We’re excited to have a full roster of faculty, old and new, who students will see in the classrooms. Our faculty cohort are familiar with teaching and interacting with enthusiastic and curious kids.
We look forward to seeing everyone at camp.
MATTHEW CHO
Matthew is an incoming grad student at UCSD. He enjoys math, puzzles, ice skating, chess (although he isn’t very good), Nerf guns, and the Minecraft Championship.
WENDY K TAM CHO
Wendy is a Professor at the University of Illinois where she has appointments in Political Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Asian American Studies, Law, and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mathematics is the tie that holds together her eclectic interests. She has loved math all her life, but really discovered its beauty when she started teaching math to her sons, who love math even more than she does! Her sons wanted to do math with other kids, so she began her own math circle and started teaching at math summer camps. Her mathematical journey has been immensely fulfilling and has taught her that sharing mathematical beauty (especially with children) is the surest and quickest way to multiply its appreciation and joy.
ANITA CHOU, Camp Director
Anita, coming from an electrical engineering background, is deeply interested in math and science education. She holds a special interest in helping radically accelerated kids meet their needs. Towards that end she sits on the board of and is actively involved in several local gifted advocacy organizations. She is excited to be on the forefront of coordinating resources, local and afar, and working closely with families in staging Campersand.
JAMES DEGNAN
James grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he attended Jefferson Middle School and Albuquerque High School. He went to college and graduate school at the University of New Mexico with majors in philosophy and math with a minor in music, and finished a PhD in statistics in 2005. Afterward, he did postdocs at Harvard in biostatistics and University of Michigan in human genetics. In 2008, he moved to New Zealand to join the faculty at the University of Canterbury.
After five years, including experiencing the earthquakes in Christchurch in 2011, he moved back to his hometown to be a professor at UNM. His research has mostly focused on probabilistic models of evolutionary trees. He has also co-directed the UNM-PNM New Mexico High School Math Contest since 2021.
DANIEL HADER
Fascinated by the 3D graphics of his favorite video games, Daniel initially went to the University of Arkansas with hopes of becoming a software developer. Unfortunately, he quickly found himself mixed up with the wrong crowd, the math department, where he become hooked on higher mathematics. Now, after receiving Bachelor’s degrees in both math and computer science, Daniel has forgone his plans for a fancy tech job to instead pursue a PhD in theorectical computer science where he can feed his addiction to proofs while still expressing his love for computers.
As an undergrad, Daniel planned activities for his university’s math club and designed puzzles for their weekly newsletter. he continues to participate in several math outreach programs including annual summer workshops hosted by his advisor, where he helps teach high school students complex topics such as set theory and computational complexity.
TODD B KRAUSE
Todd remains equally unskilled in a range of disciplines. His parents forced him to go to college for a year, but that didn’t stop him from skipping out at the end to be in a rock band. The fact that you’re reading about him here gives you a clue as to how that ended up. Ironically in that first year he got hooked on mathematics, physics, and ancient languages, and he stuck with them all the way through his doctoral studies.
Though formally a mathematical physicist with research experience in nonlinear dynamics, Hamiltonian systems, and numerical simulations of black hole collisions, his day job finds him publishing free online lessons for ancient languages with the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. You might’ve run across some of his box-office hits, lesson series on Old Church Slavonic, Gothic, and even Tocharian. Yes, those are names of actual languages. Best not to get him started…
DAVID METZLER
David grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, spending a lot of time on the UNM campus where his father was a professor of mathematics. He has loved mathematics and science from a young age, and as he went through his undergraduate and graduate degrees in math, he found that he especially enjoyed teaching eager students about the beauty of the subject. He spent seven years working at the college level before returning to his hometown, where he now teaches at Albuquerque Academy. For the last thirteen years he has run his own week-long math enrichment camp, Numbers in the Summer, and he is excited to join the Campersand faculty.
When he is not teaching math, you can usually find him hiking or camping in the mountains of the Southwest.
BURTON NEWMAN, Academic Director
Growing up, Burton always wondered what it’s like to be a mathematician and why such brilliant minds would dedicate themselves to this sort of activity. What do they see in it? What do they value? He decided the best way to answer these questions was to become a mathematician himself. He gained the most insight into these questions while working as a counselor for two summers at the Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists (PROMYS) at Boston University. There, he realized the importance of immersing oneself in whatever culture one is trying to understand. Today he teaches and mentors accelerated math students all over the country.
LEANNA PRIMANI, Parent Programming
Though her background is musical, Leanna, like Anita, is serious about math education for radically accelerated child. She brings parents together to share ideas and resources in a welcoming, non-competitive, and supportive environment. For many years, Leanna has organized the “parent talks” that run along C&! classes. She connects parents to a myriad of speakers, from all corners of the math world, and informs the parent community of opportunities, organizations, and people who can help these kids thrive.
According to Leanna, “There’s nothing like C&! out there anywhere. Having exposure and access to this incredible faculty who teach, model, and ‘get’ these young children has been a game changer for my daughter and our family. It has been a thrill bringing C&! parents together.”
YO’AV RIECK
Born and raised in Haifa, Israel, Yo’av crossed the globe to the University of Texas, Austin for graduate studies in Mathematics — specializing in low dimensional topology — following graduation from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology).
For the past 20 years he has been studying and teaching math at the University of Arkansas. During the school year he teaches at the local Fayetteville Math Circle and in the summer he travels to Japan spending time with family and collaborating with math researchers.
GUNNAR SCHMIDT
Gunnar grew up rolling in the mud pits of math, washing up for the more tidy expressions of math camps and competitions. Appreciating both the solitary journey of knowledge and the social aspects of learning with and from others, to him, Campersand works this happy balence.
Now in his sophomore year at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, Gunnar is leaning towards a philosophy major, and more importantly is still trying to figure out how to live life. In the free parcels of time, you can find him in his hammock reading something between Zhuangzi and Simone Weil, conducting mini-ethnographies, or quite simply asleep.
ROLFE SCHMIDT
Rolfe has been playing with math since he was young enough to be a camper, always looking forward to school breaks when he would have uninterrupted time with his books. It wasn’t until he began teaching mathematics to his sons that he realized how differently things could be taught, how early deep ideas could be introduced, and how kids loved to be challenged.
Over the last decade he has started a Seattle-area math circle, taught and served as academic director at Epsilon Camp and Campersand, and coached math competition teams. In his day job he is a senior researcher at Privacy Research, LLC, where he is helping the Signal Messenger team on a range of projects including private contact discovery, encrypted backups, and post-quantum cryptographic protocols. When not playing with math or writing code, Rolfe is outside running, hiking, or skiing with his family.
JEREMY VAN HORN-MORRIS
JVHM is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on the connections between topological and geometric structures on 3-,4- and 5-dimensional spaces, translating tools and ideas from one framework to the other.
Since being in Fayetteville, JVHM has helped with the math department’s Celebration of Mind, organized the weekly MOEMS group, and run a monthly Saturday Morning Math Club. He thinks that at all ages, math is more enjoyable and more powerful when thinking about it with another person.