Faculty Spotlight: Amy Wehe

Amy Wangsness Wehe, Ph.D. grew up on a farm in northeast Iowa. Besides farming, her father was at times an adjunct instructor of economics; her mother taught mathematics courses for future teachers at the local college for over 35 years. After briefly considering a career as an actuary, Amy’s interests also gravitated toward education. She earned a BA in mathematics with certification to teach mathematics and business to 7th through 12th grade students. During student teaching, she decided to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics, which she earned from Iowa State University in 2005.

Amy is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Fitchburg State University. She has taught many different courses, but almost always  teaches at least one section of Informal Geometry each semester. In addition, she has recently taught Applied Statistics, Probability and Statistics I and II, Geometry, and Informal Number Theory. Her favorite part of being an educator is watching students grow and learn throughout the semester and throughout their tenure at Fitchburg State.

Her research interests include combinatorial matrix theory, which involves graph theory and linear algebra, and other discrete mathematics topics. She has recently enjoyed collaborating on interdisciplinary work with biologists working on a better algorithm for finding the distance between gene strings. During her time at Fitchburg State, she published several academic articles in peer-reviewed journals. Just this year, she published “3GOLD: Optimized Levenshtein distance for clustering third-generation sequencing data” with coauthors in the field of biology.

Amy lives in Massachusetts with her partner and son. They love cooking, hiking, bike-riding, traveling, and playing cribbage. They most love to travel to places near water, no matter whether it is an ocean, sea, river, stream, or pond.

Selected Publications:

Logan, Robert; Fleischmann, Zoe; Annis, Sofia; Wangsness Wehe, Amy; Tilly, Jonathan L.; Woods, Dori C.; Khrapko, Konstantin. 3GOLD: Optimized Levenshtein distance for clustering third-generation sequencing data. BMC Bioinformatics, v23, 95, 2022.

Wangsness Wehe, Amy, Informal Geometry, Second Edition, Kendall Hunt, Dubuque, IA, 2017.

DeAlba, Luz; Hogben, Leslie; Wangsness Wehe, Amy.  Matrix completion problems. Handbook of Linear Algebra, Second Edition, Taylor & Francis Group/CRC Press, 2014, pgs 49-1 – 49-30.

Wangsness Wehe, Amy and 15 other authors; Minimum rank of skew-symmetric matrices described by a graph—IMA-ISU research group on minimum rank. Linear Algebra and Its Applications, v432, 2010, pgs. 2457-2472.