Minnesota Chapter Scholar Award 2017-2018
Field of Study -  Computer Science and Engineering

Kathryn (Kate) Jensen is a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Computer Science. Kate works under the supervision of Dr. Zhi-Li Zhang, studying graphical networks and computational complexity. Kate is primarily interested in defining and understanding graphical invariants and graphical functions - what are the transformations on graphs that preserve graphical structure? What are the transformations that leave graphs unchanged?  How might these transformations be broadly classified and applied?                 

Her most recent work examines similarity transformations of laplacian matrices (an algebraic representation of a graph) and demonstrates under which circumstances such transformations produce graphs. This work has interesting implications for the problem of graph isomorphism (determining when two graphs may be thought of as "identical" in structure).