News

A team of University of Florida undergraduates earned top honors in the 2025 Mathematical/Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (MCM/ICM), placing in the top 2% of over 21,000 teams worldwide and receiving the distinguished INFORMS Award, the highest honor a UF team has ever achieved in the competition.

The MCM/ICM is an international mathematical modeling competition that challenges undergraduate teams to develop innovative solutions to complex problems across disciplines such as public policy, sustainability, operations research and data science. Teams work collaboratively over four days to analyze an open-ended problem, formulate models, run simulations and communicate their findings in a written report.

The standout team included fourth-year mathematics major Xavier Gottlieb-Young, third-year mathematics major Jada Sitchler and second-year statistics major Bryn Nurczyk. They tackled problem C of the six presented to them, which focused on the interdisciplinary challenges in modeling. Their work earned them not only a Finalist designation, which was awarded to 343 teams globally, but also the INFORMS Award, making them the only team out of more than 12,500 entries for Problem C to receive this recognition.

“The MCM/ICM contest is arguably the premier undergraduate mathematical modeling contest in the world, so obtaining the Finalist designation, and on top of that, the INFORMS Award, is an incredible honor for our UF team,” said Youngmin Park, Ph.D., assistant professor of mathematics and one of the faculty mentors for the team. “The award recognizes their creative problem-solving skills, attention to detail and exemplary written explanation of their solution.”

The INFORMS Award, presented by the Institute for Operations research and the Management Sciences, is awarded to only one team per problem whose submission most demonstrates the real-world modeling and analytical excellence found in professional practice.

UF began participating in the MCM/ICM in 2020 under the leadership of Tracy Stepien, Ph.D., assistant professor of mathematics, and student training and mentorship has expanded each year. This year’s program was co-led by Stepien and Park, with support from mathematics graduate students Hemaho Taboe, Abhiram Hegade and Kyle Adams.

“The MCM/ICM has significantly grown in size since its inception over 25 years ago, from around 500 teams to over 21,000 teams participating,” said Stepien. “The real-world problems posed in the contest are hard because they are open-ended questions, which is more similar to a research problem and very different than what students typically encounter in a standard mathematics class. Plus, the students only get 96 hours to come up with a solution!”

In total, 19 UF students across 7 teams participated in the 2025 contest. One additional team received an Honorable Mention, and five teams were recognized as Successful Participants.

Honorable Mention – Team 2524908 (Problem C)
Antoni Deja (Mathematics, Physics, first-year)
Daniel Soto (Mathematics, third-year)
Leo Shan (Mathematics, first-year)

Successful Participants:
Team 2524924 (Problem A) – Brian Cai, Hunor Vajda, John McDonald
Team 2524926 (Problem A) – Miguel Carrasco, Sanandan Ojha, Tony Pham
Team 2524915 (Problem C) – Henry Zhu, Tuyen Truong, Dongyuan Li
Team 2524922 (Problem C) – JB Gracey, Lina Filkin, Alexa Ernce
Team 2524912 (Problem E) – Zoey Cao, Bill Zhang, Blue Pu