Rome Lab mathematician earns award

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  • Air Force Research Laboratory
The Mohawk Valley Engineers Executive Council (MVEEC) Young Technologist of the Year award was presented to a research mathematician from the Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate during the 65th annual Mohawk Valley Technical Awards banquet April 23 in New York Mills, New York.

Dr. Victoria Horan received this year's award, which highlights a superior individual engineer among the generation of emerging technologists within the Mohawk Valley who are under the age of 30.

Horan came to the Information Directorate (RI) through the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation scholarship program in 2012 after her graduation from Arizona State University.  Since her arrival, Horan has published six peer reviewed journal papers to include "Overlap Cycles for Steiner Quadruple Systems" which received AFRL Information Directorate's Fred I. Diamond Award for Best Technical Paper in 2014. Horan has earned four separate research internships. Currently Horan is leading a number of efforts in complex networking, graph theory, and combinatorics (the study of how discrete objects combine with one another and the probabilities of various outcomes).

Horan has received international recognition for her research in discrete mathematics - the branch of mathematics dealing with objects that can assume only distinct, separated values.

Her peers routinely request her attendance at mathematics conferences to include the Joint Math Meetings, the largest mathematics conference in the world.

Horan's expertise is evident in her presentations such as: 'Identifying Codes on De Bruijn Graphs', 'Critical Node Location in de Bruijn Networks', 'Overlap Cycles', 'Universal Cycles for Weak Orders and a Problem of Knuth', and 'Graph-Based Zero-Knowledge Proofs', presented at Joint Math Symposia, Air Force Office of Scientific Research programs, and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conferences on discrete mathematics.

Additionally, Horan is co-chair of RI's Junior Force Council. She is a member of the Federal Woman's Program and helped establish a mentoring program for new employees.

RI develops information technologies for air, space and ground systems, focusing its research on novel and affordable command, control, communications, cyber and intelligence technologies.