Victoria Uribe is a Mexican-American Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University where she is co-advised by Malena Español and Rodrigo Platte. Raised in Paradise, California, she attended community college before receiving her BS in Applied Mathematics from California State University, Chico in 2016. She originally thought she wanted to be a lawyer and briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley School of Law before deciding to continue her education in Applied Mathematics instead.

Victoria’s research interests include inverse problems, numerical linear algebra, and machine learning. In particular, she is interested in numerical methods for solving large-scale inverse problems and in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image classification. Victoria is currently working with mentors at the Air Force Research Laboratory for her dissertation and hopes to work in industry after graduation.

Victoria also enjoys writing and credits Pamela Harris and the Math SWAGGER workshop in 2020 for providing her with opportunities to write about being a Latinx Ph.D. student. Victoria has since served as the TA for her advisor’s Mathematics Sin Fronteras bilingual lecture series and as a Staff Writer for the AMS Graduate Student Blog before pursing the opportunity to start the Lathisms Blog.

Victoria’s advice for students just starting out is to just keep going. She saw a quote recently that said, “Be naive enough to start and stubborn enough to finish.” She thinks that it’s difficult to make sense of the Ph.D. process until you go through it yourself and reminds students, “That’s why it’s extremely important to find mentors (maybe outside of your department or even your institution) that can provide you with encouragement and the perspective of someone who’s been in your shoes before.”

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“Hispanic Heritage Month is important to me because representation is powerful. I didn’t know of any Latinx mathematicians when I started my PhD, but because of programs like Math SWAGGER and the LatMath conference, I now know many! Knowing other mathematicians with backgrounds and paths to the PhD similar to mine is very encouraging and makes me more confident that I too can finish.”