Dylan Douthitt has been awarded a 2024-2025 LSU Dissertation Year Fellowship, a prestigious recognition for exemplary PhD candidates in their final academic year. This competitive fellowship enables exceptional scholars like Douthitt to have the necessary resources and support to solely focus on their dissertation research.
Douthitt's research centers on the exploration of matroids, combinatorial structures that abstract the geometric concept of dependence of vectors in space. Matroid theory holds significance in various fields, including network science, coding theory, and combinatorial optimization. His initial paper, 'Bounding the Number of Bases of a Matroid,' was recognized with an Editors’ Choice Award from the journal Discrete Mathematics for its notable contribution to the field of discrete mathematics over the past three years. Douthitt continues to advance his mathematical research under the guidance of Boyd Professor of Mathematics James Oxley.