The 2026 Prairie Discrete Mathematics Workshop (PDMW) will take place at the University of Regina on May 7th and 8th 2026. The PDMW was first started at the University of Regina in 2003 by Brian Alspach and Shaun Fallat. It has since taken place annually at various locations in the prairies and in British Columbia. This will be the seventeenth edition of the PDMW and the first in-person edition since the pandemic. This year, we are excited to have Jane Breen (Ontario Tech University) and Melissa Huggan (Vancouver Island University) as our two invited speakers. Participants are also invited to submit an abstract for a contributed talk. Students and postdoctoral fellows are especially encouraged to present. We will also be hosting a lightning round of 3-minute talks in which participants will be invited to present an open problem of their interest.

Jane Breen, Ontario Tech University

Jane Breen is currently an Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics at Ontario Tech University since 2019. She received her PhD from the University of Manitoba in 2018 under the supervision of Steve Kirkland, and spent a year in Iowa State University as a postdoctoral researcher. Her research is in combinatorial matrix theory and spectral graph theory, with special interest in Markov chains and random walks on graphs.

Melissa Huggan, Vancouver Island University

Melissa Huggan is a professor in the department of mathematics at Vancouver Island University. She started her position in 2022, and is also an adjunct professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and at the University of Victoria. Prior to this, she held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at Toronto Metropolitan University and an AARMS postdoctoral fellowship at Mount Allison University. Melissa was awarded a 2022 Kirkman medal by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications and in 2024 was awarded the Provost's early career research excellence award at Vancouver Island University. Her research program is externally funded by NSERC and focuses on pursuit-evasion games and combinatorial game theory.