In February 2012, 6 teams of 3 students from UCI participated in the international Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM). The results just came out and all the teams earned certificates, with two teams earning special designations.
 
Austin Fringer (Math+ICS major), Wes Fuhrman (Physics major) and Arturo Vargas (Math major) earned a Meritorious award. This means they were in the top 9% of the 3697 teams in the competition. Only one US team scored higher.
 
Mai Nguyen (Math major), Linh Doan (Chemical Eng.) and Daniel Le (Chemical Eng.) earned an Honorable Mention award. The Honorable Mention award is given to the top 12-40% of teams in the competition.
 
The following student teams earned Successful Participant awards: Fernando Aguilar, Arthur Dunn, Hector Garcia, Scott Gettinger, Hike Hambarsoomian, Abdon Inguez, Travis Johnson, Matthew Kelly, Lucy Longo, Lorella Multini, George Villegas-Vasquez, and Mary Whitelaw.
 
Leading up to the MCM, the students met weekly with Arvind Baskaran and Sarah Eichhorn to prepare for the competition. The preparation meetings included learning mathematical and computational tools and general discussion of the mathematical modeling process and scientific writing. The MCM contest is a four day event in which teams of three students write a paper to answer one real world modeling scenario. More information about the contest and results can be found at: http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/