Community Lecture on 'Mathematical Models: A World of Insight' Featured in Spring Lecture Series

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Professor Lisette de Pillis

This year the annual Spring Lecture Series in Mathematics will feature a Community Lecture delivered by Lisette de Pillis at 6 p.m. on Friday, May 5, in the Reynolds Center Auditorium. It will be preceded at 5:15 by a panel discussion on Women in Mathematics, also open to the community.

In the lecture, de Pillis will explore the ways in which mathematical models hold the keys to understanding some of the most interesting and complex phenomena in the natural world. In particular, de Pillis will reveal how to harness the power of mathematical modeling to answer challenging questions that may at first seem unsolvable. Can an overflowing bathtub help us figure out how to achieve herd immunity in a pandemic? Can the interaction between a rabbit and a lynx help us understand how human immune cells fight cancer? By making a few simplifying assumptions, parallels can be drawn between natural systems that may appear radically different on the surface to unlock new levels of understanding the world around us.

De Pillis is the Norman F. Sprague Professor of Life Sciences and a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. Passionate about using mathematics to seek solutions to real-world problems, she works with biologists, oncologists, biotechnology researchers and other mathematicians to search for new ways to treat diseases that interact with the immune system, in particular cancer, HIV, SARS-CoV-2 and Type I diabetes.

De Pillis has been recognized for her multidisciplinary research excellence with the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Distinguished Scholar Award from the Argonne National Laboratory. She is also a HERS-CBL Clare Boothe Luce Leadership in STEM Scholar, an Intercollegiate Biomathematics Alliance Distinguished Fellow and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

The public lecture will be held in tandem with a research-oriented conference featuring a series of five lectures delivered by Anna Mazucatto focussing on turbulence, fluids and mixing. Mazucatto completed her Ph.D. at UNC Chapel Hill under the direction of Michael Taylor. Since then, she has held positions at 10 other prestigious institutions. Presently, she holds the titles professor and distinguished senior scholar at the Pennsylvania State University. She has written extensively in her fields, with 48 total publications and 768 citations. She has received 12 NSF grants and was the sole principal investigator on seven of them.

In recognition for her research achievements, she has received the following awards and recognitions: (2021) Fellow, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; (2019) Teresa Cohen Mathematical Service Award, Penn State University; (2011) Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize, awarded by the Association for Women in Mathematics.

The Spring Lecture Series is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.