Dr. Wumaier Maimaitiyiming, an assistant teaching professor of mathematics and statistics at Missouri S&T, has been named a 2025 Engineering Unleashed Fellow.

Maimaitiyiming is one of 29 fellows from 23 universities selected this year as part of Engineering Unleashed, the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network’s (KEEN) national community of faculty focused on advancing the entrepreneurial mindset — centered on curiosity, connections and creating value — in engineering education.

Through the fellowship, Maimaitiyiming will receive a $10,000 grant from the Kern Family Foundation to support his project focused on using modeling and optimization concepts in foundational math courses to give students more experience applying mathematical theory to real problems in engineering, biology and architecture.

“Mathematics can feel abstract when it’s presented as a set of procedures instead of a way to understand the world,” Maimaitiyiming says. “By framing concepts through modeling and optimization, I want students to see how math explains the systems that engineers design and the decisions they make. When students connect equations to real applications, they can gain confidence, stay engaged and understand how their work creates value.”

Maimaitiyiming joined the Missouri S&T faculty in 2023. Before that, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an instructor at Xinjiang University of Finance and Economics in Urumqi, China.

He earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Iowa State University and both a master’s degree and bachelor’s degree in computational mathematics from Xinjiang University.

For more information about Missouri S&T’s KEEN initiatives, visit cafe.mst.edu/teaching/keen.

About Missouri S&T

Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) is a STEM-focused research university of over 7,000 students located in Rolla, Missouri. Part of the four-campus University of Missouri System, Missouri S&T offers over 100 degrees in 40 areas of study and is among the nation’s top public universities for salary impact, according to the Wall Street Journal. For more information about Missouri S&T, visit www.mst.edu.