Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Vassar College. My research interests are in topological data analysis (TDA), computational topology and geometry, and mathematical biology. I regularly teach undergraduate statistics, data science, and math classes. In addition to research and teaching, I also care about making the scientific community more welcoming and accessible. I contribute to various outreach programs that focus on this. More details can be found in my CV.
Links: CV. google scholar. linkedin.
Email: rbelton@vassar.edu Pronouns: she/her
News
- December 2025. I am giving a talk in the Statistical Methodology for Data with Spatial and Temporal Dependencies session at the 19th International Joint Conference on Computational and Financial Econometrics (CFE) and Computational and Methodological Statistics (CMStatistics).
- September 2025. I am teaching two sections of Math 241: Probability and a senior seminar on the mathematics and implementation of selected data science algorithms.
- August 2025. I am participating and presenting at the New Researchers Conference right before the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). Furthermore, I am giving a talk at JSM in the Novel Methods and Applications for Time Series Data session.
- July 2025. I am attending Algebraic Topology: Methods, Computation, and Science and presenting a poster.
- June 2025. My collaborator, Georg Essl, is presenting our paper, "Topology-Preserving Deformations of Streaming Audio via Box Snake Surgery" at the International Computer Music Conference in Boston.
- May 2025. I am attending the Applied Math in Statistics and Data Science Education workshop at ICERM.
- April 2025. My Vassar colleagues and I are organizing DataFest. This is a weekend long data analysis competition for undergraduates. We encourage students in the Poughkeepsie region to participate.
- April 2025. Enrique Alvarado and I are organizing a special session at the AMS Eastern Sectional Meeting. We have a fantastic line up of presenters on Data Driven Methods in Biology.
- March 2025. I received an Outstanding Reviewer award for my work in reviewing submissions to the 2025 Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG).
- February 2025. Paper Acceptance! G-Mapper: Learning a Cover in the Mapper Construction has been accepted for publication in the SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science (SIMODS)!