Meet the faculty

VRMT is organized by several students and faculty from Vanderbilt.

Lori Rafter – Principal Senior Lecturer

Lori Rafter has been a lecturer in the math department at Vanderbilt since 2004, and she often teaches courses in Calculus and Statistics. She is excited to meet students who are passionate about math and encourage them to study mathematics in college and beyond!

Larry Rolen – Assistant Professor

Larry Rolen is an assistant professor in the Department of Math at Vanderbilt. He works in a field called number theory, which studies patterns in the arithmetic of whole numbers. For example, famous problems in number theory ask about how common prime numbers are, and whether even whole numbers bigger than two are always a sum of two primes. Dr. Rolen works with special functions called modular forms, which are functions with infinitely many symmetries, and especially has studied their applications to sequences of numbers which count things, to geometry, and to physics (such as black holes).

Madelynn Roche (she/her/hers) – Student Organizer

Madelynn is a senior at Vanderbilt double majoring in Math and Education Studies. She is passionate about helping women, LGBTQ+ folks, and students of color to see themselves as “math people”. She is a co-founder of the VU Student Chapter of the Association for Women in Math and the Vice President of Pi Mu Epsilon, the math honor society at Vanderbilt. Outside of math, she loves being a part of the Wesley Fellowship, Interfaith Council, and being a Resident Adviser. She is excited to help bring VRMT to campus and can’t wait to meet students at the competition in November!