When Ashley Peper started to get serious about finding a career that would scratch her math itch, her teachers at Stevens Point Area Senior High floated the standard ideas: accountant or math teacher.
“I don’t want to do either of those,” Peper remembers thinking. “I want to do something more fun.”
About a decade later, Peper is putting the finishing touches on her PhD in industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and preparing to start a faculty job at her undergraduate alma mater, UW-Stevens Point.
Peper, who will complete her doctoral work in summer 2025, has spent the past five years working with Professors Laura Albert and Jim Luedtke applying operations research to cybersecurity systems.
Specifically, Peper uses integer programming techniques to determine which cybersecurity measures complex organizations should prioritize when planning their systems.
“She’s really curious,” says Albert, Peper’s co-adviser. “She really likes math and optimization. It’s like solving a puzzle, and algorithm design is how you solve that puzzle. It’s been fun to watch her tackle these really difficult problems computationally and elegantly using mathematics.”
Graduate school wasn’t originally Peper’s plan, despite encouragement from her professors. She’d majored in math with an actuarial emphasis at UW-Stevens Point, with minors in economics and computer information systems that allowed her to dabble in the basics of computer programming that are central to operations research.
When an actuarial internship didn’t pan out one summer, she opted for a Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Grand Valley State University in Michigan that leveraged more of her programming skills.
“I just found it really fun that you could solve a lot of really interesting problems with the same sort of techniques, even though they’re all completely different,” she says.
At UW-Madison, she’s worked with Albert on a National Science Foundation-supported project on how to build and deploy cybersecurity defenses over time to mitigate risk in complex organizations. Peper, Albert and alumnus Eric Dubois (PhDIE ’20), now at the Center for Naval Analyses, published a paper on the topic in the journal Decision Analysis in 2023.
She’s enjoyed creating lesson plans for discussion sections and helping undergraduate students make sense of complicated material as a teaching assistant. She’s also played violin in the All-University String Orchestra, which is open to students of all majors.
Now, Peper, who grew up in a tight-knit family in Plover, Wisconsin, just south of Stevens Point, is eager to inspire students to follow her lead by applying advanced mathematical techniques to solve interesting problems. Albert calls it a gift to the state that a product of the Universities of Wisconsin is sticking around to educate the next generation of students.
“I’m really excited because I really liked it there,” says Peper, who will join UW-Stevens Point’s Department of Computing and New Media Technologies. “It’s cool to also just go back and work with people who were my teachers before, because they’re super cool people and now to think I’m going to be one of those cool teachers is fun.”
Top photo by Joel Hallberg