• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2021

• Duke University, Applied Mathematics ‘21

• Host Institution: Northrop Grumman

• Mentor: Kris Lehnhardt

• Brookie Mentor: Piper Sigrest

Madeleine “Mac” Gagné is a graduating senior at Duke University in Durham North Carolina, completing an applied mathematics degree of her own design studying how to depict the human decision-making process quantitatively. Mac is fascinated by high-risk decision-making, and she plans to obtain a PhD in operations or political methodology in the coming years. She’s particularly interested in space command, mission design, space operations, artificial intelligence, and systems engineering within the aerospace community.

In prior summers, Mac has worked as a quantitative research intern for CSIS’s Defense Industrial Initiatives Group (DIIG 2018-2019), The NOAA National Weather Service (2020), and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (2020-2021). She’s presented research projects at The Pentagon (2016), NASA (2020), TEDx Duke (2020), TEDx Columbus (2016) and AMS (2021) and has conducted research projects on emergency operations, mathematically modeling triage, gerrymandering, and the evolution of democratic governments (Duke Lemur Center 2019).

At Duke, Mac is the president of The Lyceum- the first interdisciplinary mathematics social club on campus that champions BIPOC/POC, female, and LGBTQIA+ diversity in math. She’s the former co-president/president and co-founder of Freshly Squeezed Pulp, a member of the SPIRE STEM Diversity Fellowship, and a summer fellow of the Duke American Grand Strategy Program. When she’s not doing mathematics, Mac is inevitably writing, reading or drawing- all preferably pulp fiction!

As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Mac Gagné will be interning for Northrop Grumman’s Space Systems division in Virginia.