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Personal Profile of Dr. Edray Herber Goins Ph.D.

Dr. Edray Herber Goins Ph.D.
Professor
Pomona College
Department of Mathematics
Professor
Pomona College
Department of Mathematics

Home Page: https://www.pomona.edu/directory/people/edray-goins

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0792-1000

Biography
Edray Herber Goins grew up in South Los Angeles, California. The product of the Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) public school system, Dr. Goins attended the California Institute of Technology, where he majored in mathematics and physics, and earned his doctorate in mathematics from Stanford University. Dr. Goins is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He works in the field of number theory, as it pertains to the intersection of representation theory and algebraic geometry.

California Institute of Technology. He was quite involved with the under-represented student community during his undergraduate years, from 1990 through 1994. He was one of the founding members of the Caltech chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE); was a member of the Caltech Latino Science and Engineering Society (CLASES); established the Underrepresented Student Banquet and Awards Ceremony (now called the Celebration of Excellence); was a teaching assistant in the Young Engineering Science Scholars (YESS) program during its inaugural summer; sat on hiring and admissions committees for YESS for several years; taught in the Saturday Science Program (SSP), which was a precursor to YESS; and taught in the Freshman Summer Institute (FSI) during his junior and senior years - after being in the program himself during his freshman year. Dr. Goins's commitment to the underrepresented student community extended to his academic life. He conducted independent research, under the tutelage of history professor Douglas Flamming, on the history of the Black students at Caltech. This work was presented in the student publication, the California Tech, in a series of ten articles published during the Winter Term of the 1993-1994 academic year. Dr. Goins received many accolades for his service to the Caltech campus. He received the Dean's Cup during his junior year, and became a member of the Gnome Club during his senior year. The history department awarded Dr. Goins the Rodman Paul prize in 1994. In 2004, the Office of Minority Student Education (MSE) created an annual award in his honor to be given to alumni who are dedicated to creating a welcoming atmosphere for underrepresented students.

Research. Since his time at Caltech, Dr. Goins has had a successful research career. He has held positions at the world's premiere research institutions, including the National Security Agency in Ft. Meade, Maryland; the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California; the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. In January 2004 he was featured in Black Issues in Higher Education as one of the "2004 Emerging Scholars of the Year." The issue featured nine "young educators bring[ing] their passion and excitement for teaching, research, and training to the forefront of the academy." In March 2006, he gave the annual Bharucha-Reid Lecture during the Faculty Conference on Research and Teaching run by the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM). In August 2009, he gave the annual David Blackwell Lecture during the Mathematical Association of America (MAA)'s MathFest.

Undergraduate Mentoring. Dr. Goins spends most of his summers engaging underrepresented students in research in the mathematical sciences. He has taught mathematics with the Vanguard Engineering Scholarship Program through the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME); taught mathematics and physics in the Freshman Summer Institute (FSI) at Caltech; and led a research seminar in number theory in the Summer Undergraduate Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (SUMSRI) at Miami University. His former students are have enrolled in graduate programs at Howard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Stanford University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Michigan, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Yale University.
Current/Future Committee Membership
Name Office Start Date End Date
No Memberships
Past Committee Membership
Name Office Start Date End Date
Broadening Participation Advisory Apr 01, 2013 Mar 31, 2016

  3. Workshop Promoting Diversity at the Graduate Level in Mathematics: a National Forum

    Show All Collapse
    Oct 17, 2008
    Friday
    11:30 AM - 01:00 PM
    		  "A Tale of Two Cultures"
    Duane Cooper (Morehouse College), Edray Goins (Pomona College), Ruth Haas (University of Hawaii at Manoa), Yi Liu, John Meakin, Janis Oldham, Thomas Scanlon (University of California, Berkeley)