Nina Fefferman facts for kids
Nina H. Fefferman (born December 20, 1978) is an American scientist who uses math to understand how things work in nature and in groups of people. She is like a detective who uses numbers and patterns to solve puzzles about living things. She works at the University of Tennessee.
Nina studies how math can help us understand:
- Epidemiology: How diseases spread.
- Evolutionary & Behavioral Ecology: How living things change over time and why they act the way they do.
- Conservation Biology: How to protect nature and endangered species.
She looks at how the actions of one animal or person can affect a whole group. She is also the director of NIMBioS, a special center where scientists use math to study biology.
Early Life and School
Nina Fefferman's father, Charles Fefferman, is a math professor at Princeton University. Her sister, Lainie Fefferman, is a composer who writes music.
Nina loved math from a young age. She earned her first degree in math from Princeton in 1999. She then got a Master's degree in math from Rutgers University in 2001.
Later, in 2005, she earned her Ph.D. in biology from Tufts University. For her Ph.D., she wrote about using math models to study how living things change and how diseases spread.
Important Research Projects
Nina Fefferman is the director of NIMBioS. This center brings together scientists from different fields. They work together to use math to solve big problems in biology.
She also leads the PREEMPT Institute. This group is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). They work on preparing for future pandemics, which are widespread diseases.
Nina has worked on many other important research projects:
- She helped a team at START (a US Department of Homeland Security center). They studied how groups of people behave and how ideas spread online.
- She worked with DIMACS, a center for math and computer science. They focused on using math to understand large biological systems.
- She was also involved with CCICADA (another US Department of Homeland Security center). Here, she researched how complex systems work, like how different parts of a city interact.
- At InForMID (Tufts University), she helped lead research on using math models to predict and understand infectious diseases.
