Lenore Cowen facts for kids
Lenore Jennifer Cowen is an American mathematician and computer scientist. She is known for her important work in areas like graph coloring (which is about coloring maps or networks), network routing (how information travels on the internet), and computational biology (using computers to understand living things). She is a professor of computer science at Tufts University, and also teaches mathematics there.
Early Life and Education
Lenore Cowen grew up with parents who loved learning. Her father, Robert Cowen, was a mathematics professor, and her mother, Ilsa Cowen, taught English in high school.
From a young age, Lenore showed many talents. She started playing the classical violin when she was five years old. In high school, at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, she even helped edit the school's poetry magazine.
Even with these interests, she found her passion in math. She decided to study mathematics after attending a special summer math program for high school students called the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics.
She began her studies at Yale University when she was only 16. In 1987, she earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics. She was also recognized as the top math graduate that year, winning the deForest Prize.
After Yale, she continued her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, she studied applied mathematics, which is about using math to solve real-world problems. She earned her Ph.D. in 1993. Her main research was about how to represent graphs and networks using computers.
Career Highlights
After finishing her Ph.D., Dr. Cowen did more research at Rutgers University and the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications.
In 1994, she joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of mathematical sciences. This was her first teaching role at a university.
In 2000, she moved to Tufts University to join the computer science department. She also started teaching mathematics there in 2004. By 2009, she became a full professor at Tufts, which is a very high teaching rank.
In 2020, Dr. Cowen took on a big role. She became the main leader for a new center at Tufts. This center is called the Tufts Center for Transdisciplinary Research in Principles Of Data Science (T-TRIPODS). It focuses on how different fields can work together using data science.
Awards and Recognition
Dr. Cowen has received important awards for her work.
In 2020, the Education Committee of the Computing Research Association gave her the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award. This award recognized her excellent work in guiding college students at Tufts. She helped them with research that combined different subjects, especially in computational biology and data science.
In 2023, she was chosen to be a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Being a SIAM Fellow is a great honor that recognizes her important contributions to applied mathematics and computational science.
