The primary goal of the SPIRAL program is to provide a mentoring structure for underrepresented students and women that promotes active engagement in mathematics and statistics through an REU program. With a supportive structure, the participants will be encouraged to pursue and remain in mathematical sciences with the hopes that they diversify the talent pool of fully trained mathematicians/statisticians in academia, government, and industry.

SPIRAL was created as an REU that would address the issues of human capital and materially strengthen the foundation of these young mathematics majors, so that they return to their schools at a higher level than when they left. Students will be advanced first-year or sophomore students who are majoring in mathematics or statistics with at least a 3.2 average and must be citizens or permanent residence of USA

The mathematics component of the SPIRAL/SPATIAL REU will be Enumerative Combinatorics and the study of Riordan Arrays.