Sawyer has a postgraduate diploma in teaching from Texas State University,[1] and completed a PhD in 1999 at the University of North Texas. Her dissertation, On the Cohomology of the Complement of a Toral Arrangement, was supervised by J. Matthew Douglass.[2]
She had already visited New Zealand under a Rotary Scholarship in the 1980s, and in the early 2000s emigrated there with her husband and children. She became a secondary school teacher before joining the Massey University staff as a senior tutor in mathematics in the Institute of Fundamental Sciences. Since 2015, she has also been associated with the Pūhoro STEM Academy, a program hosted by Massey for encouraging secondary-school Māori to continue their science and technology education.[1]
In 2021 she moved from Massey to the Ministry of Education, as Learning Area Lead of Mathematics and Statistics.[3]
Recognition and service
Sawyer is a Fellow of the New Zealand Mathematical Society (NZMS),[4] and has chaired the NZMS Education Group.[1] In 2019 she won a Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching Award in the Te Whatu Kairangi Awards of the Ako Aotearoa National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, a government-funded organisation for the support and promotion of tertiary-level education.[5][6]
References
^ abcdNovak, Julia; Passmore, Rachel (December 2020), "Profile: Cami Sawyer"(PDF), NZMS Newsletter (140), New Zealand Mathematical Society: 11–12, retrieved 2022-04-08