Math Teacher
Cynthia Marcotte
Cynthia Marcotte was born in Providence RI and grew up in Mexico City. She has been a lifelong teacher, having started tutoring in Mathematics when she was in 7th grade.
Cynthia studied high school at the Bicultural Program of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey campus in the State of Mexico. When she was 17 years old she competed for and won a scholarship to represent Mexico at the Lester B Pearson College of the Pacific (Pearson College), an international high school in British Columbia, Canada, which is part of the United World Colleges and which is a full-scholarship program for students from all over the world. There she obtained an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma. During that time her family moved to Italy and her mother became an IB Biology teacher at the United World College of the Adriatic (Adriatic College) in Duino, Italy.
After graduating from Pearson College Cynthia attended Brown University in Rhode Island, taking a year abroad at the University of Nice (where she became fluent in French in part by studying math and comparative literature in French) and thereafter obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. She then moved to Italy with her family, where she worked as staff at Adriatic College, became fluent in Italian, obtained a Cambridge Certificate for Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults, taught Spanish and English and tutored mathematics. In her second year in Italy, Cynthia audited the Mathematics Diploma Programme at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste along with students from Venezuela, Peru, Somalia, Iran, Zaire and Vietnam. She subsequently was accepted to the doctoral program in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). As a graduate student at UT she worked as a Teaching Assistant for Differential Equations and Vector Calculus classes and as an Instructor in Precalculus. She also ran the UT Math Department’s Saturday Morning Math Group program which introduces interesting and hands-on mathematics to High School and Middle School students through a monthly program open to all Austin students.
Cynthia continued to work on her research on Knot Theory and 3-dimensional manifolds under the direction of Prof. Cameron Gordon of UT while living in Los Angeles. In August of 2000 Cynthia defended her PhD Thesis at UT and earned her PhD in Mathematics. She became an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at St. Edward’s University and led the development of a new interdisciplinary program, Bioinformatics, in the School of Natural Sciences. She also published papers on the application of her field (Topology) to molecular biology (in particular, on enzymes that act on DNA) in collaboration with Dorothy Buck, currently at Imperial College, London.
In 2005 Cynthia took a leave of absence from St. Edward’s University and she and Edward welcomed their twins, Elinor and Nicolás to the world in 2006. In 2013 she returned to St. Edward’s as an adjunct professor of Mathematics. She recently published two papers on Knot Theory in collaboration with her father, Alberto Verjovsky, an expert in the field of Dynamical Systems, and a former PhD student of his, Gabriela Hinojosa.
Last year Cynthia started teaching part-time in the Middle Years Programme (MYP) at Magellan, in particular teaching high-school math (Algebra I). As someone who benefited tremendously from the International Baccalaureate, she was thrilled to have found Magellan and has been amazed at the growth and learning exhibited by Elinor and Nicolás, with the support and love of their teachers. They will be starting the Middle Years Program this year!
Cynthia is very honored to continue to work with the MYP faculty in enriching and differentiating the mathematics curriculum and in deepening interdisciplinary connections between Mathematics and the other MYP subjects. Her passion is to show students (and everyone) the beauty and power of mathematics while ensuring deep numeracy and problem-solving skills with a focus on applications.
