Minerva Cordero Braña is a Puerto Rican mathematician, and a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also the university's Senior Associate Dean for the College of Science, where she is responsible for the advancement of the research mission of the college.
Early life and education
Cordero was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Her mother, whose schooling stopped after the fifth grade, made education a top priority in the family home. She told her children "the best thing I can give you is an education." Cordero and her siblings would do their homework together and discussed what they learned in school each day. Cordero said, "We learned each other's subjects". Wanting to go to college, Cordero bought herself an SAT preparation book in high school and studied for the exam. Her SAT exam scores are the highest scores for her high school, Miguel Melendez Munoz High School. Cordero attended the Universidad de Puerto Rico and received her B.S. degree in 1981. She was granted a National Science Foundation Minority Graduate Fellowship which she used to attend the University of California at Berkeley to obtain a Master of Arts degree in Mathematics. Cordero graduated from Berkeley in 1983 with a M.A. in Mathematics. She continued her studies at the University of Iowa, and obtained her PhD in Mathematics in 1989 under Norman Johnson.
Research and Professional career
After earning her PhD, she worked as an Associate and Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University until 2001, when she joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington. Cordero served as the Mathematical Association of America's Governor-at-Large for Minority Interests from 2008 to 2011. Her most cited work is A survey of finite semifields. She was the Principal Investigator for a $2.85 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to the University of Texas Arlington in 2009 for a project that placed mathematics graduate students in Arlington public schools to enhance teaching and learning in the classrooms and to inspire students to pursue careers in STEM.
Research
Cordero's research is in the area of finite semifields and their associated planes in the general area of finite geometry. Her earlier work was on the classification side, namely, sorting out isomorphisms among constructed semifield planes—this is a highly technical and difficult endeavor. Cordero is one of the experts in this area.
